
Class "PNSII 
Book , W 3 5 



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COKfRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 



IAN MACLAREN 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 



IAN MACLAREN 

AUTHOR OF "BESIDE THE BONNIE BRIAR BUSH," "AULD 
LANG SYNE." "KATE CARNEGY." ETC., ETC. 



Wo£5>*\^Vu*~ 




HODDER & STOUGHTON 

NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1912, 
By George H. Doran Company 



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©CU330188 



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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Books and Bookmen . . . ,. , M . i 

Humour : an Analysis . . . . . . 45 

Robert Burns . ,. 91 

The Waverley Novels . ,.-, . ,„, . 127 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 



Books and Bookmen 

THEY cannot be separated any more 
than sheep and a shepherd, but I am 
minded to speak of the bookman 
rather than of his books, and so it will be best 
at the outset to define the tribe. 

It does not follow that one is a bookman 
because he has many books, for he may be a 
book huckster or his books may be those with- 
out which a gentleman's library is not com- 
plete. And in the present imperfect arrange- 
ment of life one may be a bookman and yet 
have very few books, since he has not the 
wherewithal to purchase them. It is the 
foolishness of his kind to desire a loved au- 
thor in some becoming dress, and his fastidi- 
ousness to ignore a friend in a four-pence- 
halfpenny edition. The bookman, like the 
poet, and a good many other people, is born 
and not made, and my grateful memory re- 
tains an illustration of the difference between 
a bookowner and a bookman which I think is 
apropos. As he was to preside at a lecture I 



2 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

was delivering he had in his courtesy invited 
me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he 
proposed to take the role that night of a man 
who had been successful in business, but yet 
allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle 
with literature, he desired to create an atmos- 
phere, and so he proposed with a certain im- 
posing air that we should visit what he called 
" my library." Across the magnificence of 
the hall we went in stately procession, he first, 
with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of 
taxes could have at once assessed his income, 
and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, fol- 
lowing in the rear, trembling like a skiff in 
the wake of an ocean liner. " There," he 
said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his 
waistcoat, " what do you think of that? " 
And that was without question a very large 
and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase 
with glass doors. Before I saw the doors I 
had no doubt about my host, but they were a 
seal upon my faith, for although a bookman 
is obliged to have one bit of glass in his gar- 
den for certain rare plants from Russia and 
Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white 
vellum lily upon which the air must not be 
allowed to blow, especially when charged 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 3 

with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates this 
conservatory, just as much as he loves its con- 
tents. His contentment is to have the flowers 
laid out in open beds, where he can pluck a 
blossom at will. As often as one sees the 
books behind doors, and most of all when the 
doors are locked, then he knows that the 
owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with 
them in the evening hours when the work of 
the day is done, but their jailer, who has 
bought them in the market-place for gold, 
and holds them in this foreign place by force. 
It has seemed to me as if certain old friends 
looked out from their prison with appealing 
glance, and one has been tempted to break the 
glass and let, for instance, Elia go free. It 
would be like the emancipation of a slave. 
Elia was not, good luck for him, within this 
particular prison, and I was brought back 
from every temptation to break the laws of 
property by my chairman, who was still pur- 
suing his catechism. "What," was question 
two, u do you think I paid for that? " It was 
a hopeless catechism, for I had never pos- 
sessed anything like that, and none of my 
friends had in their homes anything like that, 
and in my wildest moments I had never asked 



4 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

the price of such a thing as that. As it 
loomed up before me in its speckless respecta- 
bility and insolence of solid wealth my Eng- 
lish sense of reverence for money awoke, and 
I confessed that this matter was too high for 
me; but even then, casting a glance of depre- 
cation in its direction, I noticed that was al- 
most filled by a single work, and I wondered 
what it could be. " Cost £80 if it cost a 
penny, and I bought it second-hand in perfect 
condition for £17, 5s., with the books thrown 
in — All the Year Round from the beginning 
in half calf; " and then we returned in pro- 
cession to the drawing-room, where my pa- 
tron apologised for our absence, and ex- 
plained that when two bookmen got together 
over books it was difficult to tear them away. 
He was an admirable chairman, for he occu- 
pied no time with a review of literature in his 
address, and he slept without being noticed 
through mine (which is all I ask of a chair- 
man), and so it may seem ungrateful, but in 
spite of " that " and any books, even Spenser 
and Chaucer, which that might have con- 
tained, this Maecenas of an evening was not a 
bookman. 

It is said, and now I am going to turn the 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 5 

application of a pleasant anecdote upside 
down, that a Colonial squatter having made 
his pile and bethinking himself of his soul, 
wrote home to an old friend to send him out 
some chests of books, as many as he thought 
fit, and the best that he could find. His 
friend was so touched by this sign of grace that 
he spent a month of love over the commission, 
and was vastly pleased when he sent off, in 
the best editions and in pleasant binding, the 
very essence of English literature. It was a 
disappointment that the only acknowledg- 
ment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say 
that the consignment had arrived in good con- 
dition. A year afterwards, so runs the story, 
he received a letter which was brief and to the 
point. " Have been working over the books, 
and if anything new has been written by Wil- 
liam Shakespeare or John Milton, please send 
it out." I believe this is mentioned as an in- 
stance of barbarism. It cannot be denied that 
it showed a certain ignorance of the history 
of literature, which might be excused in a 
bushman, but it also proved, which is much 
more important, that he had the smack of let- 
ters in him, for being turned loose without the 
guide of any training in this wide field, he 



6 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

fixed as by instinct on the two classics of the 
English tongue. With the help of all our 
education, and all our reviews, could you and 
I have done better, and are we not every day, 
in our approval of unworthy books, doing 
very much worse. Quiet men coming home 
from business and reading, for the sixth time, 
some noble English classic, would smile in 
their modesty if any one should call them 
bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder 
judgment in literature than coteries of clever 
people who go crazy for a brief time over the 
tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity 
of some fantastic critic. 

There are those who buy their right to citi- 
zenship in the commonwealth of bookmen, 
but this bushman was free-born, and the sign 
of the free-born is, that without critics to aid 
him, or the training of a University, he knows 
the difference between books which are so 
much printed stuff and a good book which is 
" the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit." 
The bookman will of course upon occasion 
trifle with various kinds of reading, and there 
is one member of the brotherhood who has a 
devouring thirst for detective stories, and has 
always been very grateful to the creator of 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 7 

Sherlock Holmes. It is the merest pedantry 
for a man to defend himself with a shamed 
face for his light reading: it is enough that 
he should be able to distinguish between the 
books which come and go and those which 
remain. So far as I remember, The Mystery 
of a Hansom Cab and John Inglesant came 
out somewhat about the same time, and there 
were those of us who read them both; but 
while we thought the Hansom Cab a very in- 
genious plot which helped us to forget the te- 
dium of a railway journey, I do not know that 
there is a copy on our shelves. Certainly it 
is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard 
Feverel and The Mayor of Casterbridge. 
But some of us venture to think that in that 
admirable historical romance which moves 
with such firm foot through both the troubled 
England and the mysterious Italy of the 
seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a 
certain place in English literature. 

When people are raving between the soup 
and fish about some popular novel which to- 
morrow will be forgotten, but which doubt- 
less, like the moths which make beautiful the 
summer-time, has its purpose in the world of 
speech, it gives one bookman whom I know 



8 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

the keenest pleasure to ask his fair companion 
whether she has read Mark Rutherford. He 
is proudly conscious at the time that he is a 
witness to perfection in a gay world which is 
content with excitement, and he would be 
more than human if he had not in him a touch 
of the literary Pharisee. She has not read 
Mark Rutherford, and he does not advise her 
to seek it at the circulating library, be- 
cause it will not be there, and if she got it 
she would never read more than ten pages. 
Twenty thousand people will greedily read 
Twice Murdered and Once Hung and no 
doubt they have their reward, while only 
twenty people read Mark Rutherford; but 
then the multitude do not read Twice Mur- 
dered twice, while the twenty turn again and 
again to Mark for its strong thinking and its 
pure sinewy English style. And the children 
of the twenty thousand will not know Twice 
Murdered, but the children of the twenty, 
with others added to them, will know and love 
Mark Rutherford. Mr. Augustine Birrell 
makes it, I think, a point of friendship that a 
man should love George Borrow, whom r I 
think to appreciate is an excellent but an ac- 
quired taste ; there are others who would pro- 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 9 

pose Mark Rutherford and the Revelation in 
Tanner's Lane as a sound test for a bookman's 
palate. But . . . de gustibus . . . ! 
It is the chief office of the critic, while en- 
couraging all honest work which either can 
instruct or amuse, to distinguish between the 
books which must be content to pass and the 
books which must remain because they have 
an immortality of necessity. According to 
the weightiest of French critics of our time 
the author of such a book is one " who has en- 
riched the human mind, who has really added 
to its treasures, who has got it to take a step 
further . . . who has spoken to all in a 
style of his own, yet a style which finds itself 
the style of everybody, in a style that is at once 
new and antique, and is the contemporary of 
all the ages." Without doubt Sainte-Beuve 
has here touched the classical quality in litera- 
ture as with a needle, for that book is a classic 
to be placed beside Homer and Virgil and 
Dante and Shakespeare — among the immor- 
tals — which has wisdom which we cannot 
find elsewhere, and whose form has risen 
above the limitation of any single age. While 
ordinary books are houses which serve for a 
generation or two at most, this kind of book 



10 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

is the Cathedral which towers above the 
building at its base and can be seen from afar, 
in which many generations shall find their 
peace and inspiration. While other books are 
like the humble craft which ply from place to 
place along the coast, this book is as a stately 
merchantman which compasses the great 
waters and returns with a golden argosy. 

The subject of the book does not enter into 
the matter, and on subjects the bookman is 
very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of 
all sects. He does not require Mr. Froude's 
delightful apology to win the Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress a place on his shelf, because, although the 
bookman may be far removed from Puritan- 
ism, yet he knows that Bunyan had the secret 
of English style, and although he may be as 
far from Romanism, yet he must needs have 
his A'Kempis, especially in Pickering's edi- 
tion of 1828, and when he places the two 
books side by side in the department of reli- 
gion, he has a standing regret that there is no 
Pilgrim's Progress also in Pickering. 

Without a complete Milton he could not be 
content. He would like to have Masson's life 
too in 6 vols, (with index), and he is apt to 
consider the great Puritan's prose still finer 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 11 

than his poetry, and will often take down the 
Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of 
high latitudes ; but he has a corner in his heart 
for that evil living and mendacious bravo but 
most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. 
While he counts Gibbon's, I mean Smith and 
Milman's Gibbon's Rome in 8 vols., blue 
cloth, the very model of histories, yet he rev- 
els in those books which are the material for 
historians, the scattered stones out of which 
he builds his house, such as the diaries of John 
Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that scan- 
dalous book, Grammont's Memoirs, and that 
most credulous but interesting of Scots an- 
nalists, Robert Wodrow. 

According to the bookman, but not, I am 
sorry to say, in popular judgment, the most 
toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and 
you will find close to his hand a dainty vol- 
ume of Lamb open perhaps at that charming 
paper on " Imperfect Sympathies," and 
though the bookman be a Scot yet his palate 
is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's description of 
his national character — Lamb and the Scots 
did not agree through an incompatibility 
of humour — and near by he keeps his Haz- 
litt, whom he sometimes considers the most 



12 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

virile writer of the century: nor would he be 
quite happy unless he could find in the dark 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. He is 
much indebted to a London publisher for a 
very careful edition of the Spectator, and still 
more to that good bookman, Mr. Austin Dob- 
son, for his admirable introduction. As the 
bookman's father was also a bookman, for the 
blessing descendeth unto the third and fourth 
generation, he was early taught to love De 
Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, 
he cannot swear he has read every page in all 
the fifteen volumes — roxburghe calf — yet 
he knows his way about in that whimsical, 
discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will 
write on anything, or any person, always with 
freshness and in good English, from the char- 
acter of Judas Iscariot and " Murder as a 
Fine Art" to the Lake Poets — there never 
was a Lake school — and the Essenes. He 
has much to say on Homer, and a good deal 
also on " Flogging in Schools " ; he can 
hardly let go Immanuel Kant, but if he does 
it is to give his views, which are not favour- 
able, of Wilhelm Meister; he is not above con- 
sidering the art of cooking potatoes or the 
question of whether human beings once had 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 13 

tails, and in his theological moods he will ex- 
pound St. John's Epistles, or the principles 
of Christianity. The bookman, in fact, is a 
quite illogical and irresponsible being, who 
dare not claim that he searches for accurate 
information in his books as for fine gold, and 
he has been known to say that that department 
of books of various kinds which come under 
the head of " what's what," and " why's why," 
and " where's where," are not literature. He 
does not care, and that may be foolish, 
whether he agrees with the writer, and there 
are times when he does not inquire too curi- 
ously whether the writer be respectable, which 
is very wrong, but he is pleased if this man 
who died a year ago or three hundred years 
has seen something with his own eyes and can 
tell him what he saw in words that still have 
in them the breath of life, and he will go with 
cheerful inconsequence from Chaucer, the jol- 
liest of all book companions, and Rabelais — 
although that brilliant satirist had pages 
which the bookman avoids, because they make 
his gorge rise — to Don Quixote. If he car- 
ries a Horace, Pickering's little gem, in his 
waistcoat pocket, and sometimes pictures that 
genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he has 



14 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius. 
The bookman has a series of love affairs be- 
fore he is captured and settles down, say, with 
his favourite novel, and even after he is a mid- 
dle-aged married man he must confess to one 
or two book friendships which are perilous to 
his inflammable heart. 

In the days of calf love every boy has first 
tasted the sweetness of literature in two of 
the best novels ever written, as well as two of 
the best pieces of good English. One is Rob- 
inson Crusoe and the other the Pilgrim's 
Progress. Both were written by masters of 
our tongue, and they remain until this day 
the purest and most appetising introduction 
to the book passion. They created two 
worlds of adventure with minute vivid de- 
tails and constant surprises — -the foot on the 
sand, for instance, in Crusoe, and the valley 
of the shadow with the hobgoblin in Pilgrim's 
Progress — and one will have a tenderness 
for these two first loves even until the end. 
Afterwards one went afield and sometimes got 
into queer company, not bad but simply a lit- 
tle common. There was an endless series of 
Red Indian stories in my school-days, wherein 
trappers could track the enemy by a broken 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 15 

blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by com- 
ing down the river under a log, and the price 
was sixpence each. We used to pass the tuck- 
shop at school for three days on end in order 
that we might possess Leaping Deer, the 
Shawnee Spy. We toadied shamefully to the 
owner of Bull's Eye Joe, who, we understood, 
had been the sole protection of a frontier state. 
Again and again have I tried to find one of 
those early friends, and in many places have 
I inquired, but my humble companions have 
disappeared and left no signs, like country 
children one played with in holiday times. 

It appears, however, that I have not been 
the only lover of the trapper stories, nor the 
only one who has missed his friends, for I re- 
ceived a letter not long ago from a bookman 
telling me that he had seen my complaint 
somewhere, and sending me the Frontier 
Angel on loan strictly that I might have an 
hour's sinless enjoyment. He also said he 
was on the track of Bill Bidden, another fa- 
mous trapper, and hoped to send me word 
that Bill was found, whose original value was 
sixpence, but for whom this bookman was now 
prepared to pay gold. One, of course, does 
not mean that the Indian and trapper stories 



16 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

had the same claim to be literature as the Pil- 
grim's Progress, for, be it said with reverence, 
there was not much distinction in the style, or 
art in the narrative, but they were romances, 
and their subjects suited boys, who are bar- 
barians, and there are moments when we are 
barbarians again, and above all things these 
tales bring back the days of long ago. It was 
later that one fell under the power of two 
more mature and exacting charmers, Mayne 
Reid's Rifle Rangers and Dumas' Monte 
Cristo. The Rangers has vanished with 
many another possession of the past, but I 
still retain in a grateful memory the scene 
where Rube, the Indian fighter, who is sup- 
posed to have perished in a prairie fire and is 
being mourned by the hero, emerges with 
much humour from the inside of a buffalo 
which was lying dead upon the plain, and 
rails at the idea that he could be wiped out so 
easily. Whether imagination has been at 
work or not I do not know, but that is how 
my memory has it now, and to this day I 
count that resurrection a piece of most fetch- 
ing work. 

Rambling through a bookshop a few 
months ago I lighted on a copy of Monte 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 17 

Cristo and bought it greedily, for there was 
a railway journey before me. It is a critical 
experiment to meet a love of early days after 
the years have come and gone. This stout 
and very conventional woman — the mother 
of thirteen children — could she have been 
the black-eyed, slim girl to whom you and a 
dozen other lads lost their hearts? On the 
whole, one would rather have cherished the 
former portrait and not have seen the original 
in her last estate. It was therefore with a 
flutter of delight that one found in this case 
the old charm as fresh as ever — meaning, of 
course, the prison escape with its amazing in- 
genuity and breathless interest. 

When one had lost his bashfulness and 
could associate with grown-up books, then he 
was admitted to the company of Scott, and 
Thackeray, and Dickens, who were and are, 
as far as one can see, to be the leaders of so- 
ciety. My fond recollection goes back to an 
evening in the early sixties when a father read 
to his boy the first three chapters of the Pick- 
wick Papers from the green-coloured parts, 
and it is a bitter regret that in some clearance 
of books that precious Pickwick was allowed 
to go, as is supposed, with a lot of pamphlets 



18 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

on Church and State, to the great gain of an 
unscrupulous dealer. 

The editions of Scott are now innumerable, 
each more tempting than the other; but affec- 
tion turns back to the old red and white, in 
forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell un- 
der the magician's spell. Thackeray, for 
some reason I cannot recall, unless it were a 
prejudice in our home, I did not read in 
youth, but since then I have never escaped 
from the fascination of Vanity Fair and The 
Newcomes, and another about which I am to 
speak. What giants there were in the old 
days, when an average Englishman, tried by 
some business worry, would say, " Never 
mind, Thackeray's new book will be out to- 
morrow." They stand, these three sets, Scott, 
Thackeray, and Dickens, the very heart of 
one's library of fiction. Wearied by sex nov- 
els, problem novels, theological novels, and all 
the other novels with a purpose, one returns 
to the shelf and takes down a volume from 
this circle, not because one has not read it, 
but because one has read it thirty times and 
wishes for sheer pleasure's sake to read it 
again. Just as a tired man throws off his 
dress coat and slips on an old study jacket, so 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 19 

one lays down the latest thoughtful or intense 
or something worse pseudo work of fiction, 
and is at ease with an old gossip who is ever 
wise and cheery, who never preaches and yet 
gives one a fillip of goodness. Among the 
masters one must give a foremost place to 
Balzac, who strikes one as the master of the 
art in French literature. It is amazing that 
in his own day he was not appreciated at his 
full value, and that it was really left to time 
to discover and vindicate his position. He is 
the true founder of the realistic school in 
everything wherein that school deserves re- 
spect, and has been loyal to art. He is also 
certain to maintain his hold and be an exam- 
ple to writers after many modern realists have 
been utterly and justly forgotten. 

Two books from the shelf of fiction are 
taken down and read once a year by a certain 
bookman from beginning to end, and in this 
matter he is now in the position of a Moham- 
medan converted to Christianity who is ad- 
vised by the missionary to choose one of his 
two wives to have and to hold as a lawful 
spouse. When one has given his heart to 
Henry Esmond and the Heart of Midlothian 
he is in a strait, and begins to doubt the ex- 



20 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

pediency of literary monogamy. Of course, 
if it go by technique and finish, then Esmond 
has it, which from first to last in conception 
and execution is an altogether lovely book; 
and if it go by heroes — Esmond and Butler 
— then again there is no comparison, for the 
grandson of Cromwell's trooper was a very 
wearisome, pedantic, grey-coloured Puritan 
in whom one cannot affect the slightest inter- 
est. How poorly he compares with Henry 
Esmond, who was slow and diffident, but a 
very brave, chivalrous, single-hearted, modest 
gentleman, such as Thackeray loved to de- 
scribe. Were it not heresy to our Lady Cas- 
tlewood, whom all must love and serve, it also 
comes to one that Henry and Beatrix would 
have made a complete pair if she had put 
some assurance in him and he had instilled 
some principle into her, and Henry Esmond 
might have married his young kinswoman had 
he been more masterful and self-confident. 
Thackeray takes us to a larger and gayer scene 
than Scott's Edinburgh of narrow streets and 
gloomy jails and working people and old 
world theology, but yet it may be after all 
Scott is stronger. No bit of history, for in- 
stance, in Esmond takes such a grip of the im- 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 21 

agination as the story of the Porteous mob. 
After a single reading one carries that night 
scene etched for ever in his memory. The 
sullen, ruthless crowd of dour Scots, the grey 
rugged houses lit up by the glare of the 
torches, the irresistible storming of the Tol- 
booth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in 
the hands of his enemies, the austere and ju- 
dicial self-restraint of the people, who did 
their work as those who were serving justice, 
their care to provide a minister for the crimi- 
nal's last devotions, and their quiet dispersal 
after the execution — all this remains unto 
this day the most powerful description of 
lynch law in fiction. The very strength of 
old Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the 
Heart of Midlothian. The rivalry, however, 
between these two books must be decided by 
the heroine, and it seems dangerous to the 
lover of Scott to let Thackeray's fine lady 
stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, 
yet soul for soul which was greater, Rachel of 
Castlewood or Jeanie Deans? Lady Castle- 
wood must be taken at the chief moment in 
Esmond, when she says to Esmond: li To-day, 
Henry, in the anthem when they sang, ' When 
the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were 



22 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

like them that dream ' — I thought, yes, like 
them that dream, and then it went, ' They that 
sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that 
goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come 
again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves 
with him.' I looked up from the book and 
saw you; I was not surprised when I saw 
you, I knew you would come, my dear, 
and I saw the gold sunshine round your head." 
That she said as she laughed and sobbed, 
crying out wildly, " Bringing your sheaves 
with you, your sheaves with you." And this 
again, as Esmond thinks of her, is surely 
beaten gold. " Gracious God, who was he, 
weak and friendless creature, that such a love 
should be poured out upon him; not in vain, 
not in vain has he lived that such a treasure 
be given him? What is ambition compared 
to that but selfish vanity? To be rich, to be 
famous: what do these profit a year hence 
when other names sound louder than yours, 
when you lie hidden away under the ground 
along with the idle titles engraven on your 
coffin? Only true love lives after you, fol- 
lows your memory with secret blessing or pre- 
cedes you and intercedes for you. l Non om- 
nis moriar ' — if dying I yet live in a tender 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 23 

heart or two, nor am lost and hopeless living, 
if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays 
for me." This seems to me the second finest 
passage in English fiction, and the finest is 
when Jeanie Deans went to London and 
pleaded with the Queen for the life of her 
condemned sister, for is there any plea in all 
literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to 
human nature as this, when the Scottish peas- 
ant girl poured forth her heart: "When the 
hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the 
body — and seldom may it visit your lady- 
ship — ■ and when the hour of death that comes 
to high and low — lang and late may it be 
yours — oh, my lady, then it is na' what we 
hae dune for oursels but what we hae dune 
for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly. 
And the thought that ye hae intervened to 
spare the puir thing's life will be sweeter in 
that hour, come when it may, than if a word 
of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous 
mob at the tail of ae tow." Jeanie Deans is 
the strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, 
and an embodiment of all that is sober, and 
strong, and conscientious, and passionate in 
Scotch nature. 
The bookman has indeed no trouble arrang- 



24 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

ing his gossips in his mind, where they hold 
good fellowship, but he is careful to keep them 
apart upon his bookshelves, and when he 
comes home after an absence and finds his 
study has been tidied, which in the feminine 
mind means putting things in order, and to 
the bookman general anarchy (it was the real 
reason Eve was put out of Eden), when he 
comes home, I say, and finds that happy but 
indecorous rascal Boccaccio, holding his very 
sides for laughter, between Lecky's History 
of European Morals and Law's Serious Call, 
both admirable books, then the bookman is 
much exhilarated. Because of the mischief 
that is in him he will not relieve those two ex- 
cellent men of that disgraceful Italian's com- 
pany for a little space, but if he finds that the 
domestic sprite has thrust a Puritan between 
two Anglican theologians he effects a separa- 
tion without delay, for a religious contro- 
versy with its din and clatter is more than he 
can bear. 

The bookman is indeed perpetually en- 
gaged in his form of spring cleaning, which 
is rearranging his books, and is always hoping 
to square the circle, in both collecting the 
books of one department together, and also 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 25 

having his books in equal sizes. After a brief 
glance at a folio and an octavo side by side he 
gives up that attempt, but although he may- 
have to be content to see his large Augustine, 
Benedictine edition, in the same row with 
Bayle's Dictionary, he does not like it and 
comforts himself by thrusting in between, as 
a kind of mediator, Spotswood's History of 
the Church of Scotland with Burnett's Mem- 
oirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, that edition 
which has the rare portrait of Charles I. by 
Faithorne. He will be all his life rearrang- 
ing, and so comes to understand how it is that 
women spend forenoons of delight in box 
rooms or store closets, and are happiest when 
everything is turned upside down. It is a 
slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot 
flit a book bound after the taste of Grolier, 
with graceful interlacement and wealth of 
small ornaments, without going to the window 
and lingering for a moment over the glorious 
art, and one cannot handle a Compleat 
Angler without tasting again some favourite 
passage. It is days before five shelves are re- 
constructed, days of unmixed delight, a per- 
petual whirl of gaiety, as if one had been at a 
conversazione, where all kinds of famous peo- 



26 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

pie whom you had known afar had been gath- 
ered together and you had spoken to each as 
if he had been the friend of your boyhood. 
It is in fact a time of reminiscences, when the 
two of you, the other being Sir Thomas 
Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thack- 
eray, go over passages together which contain 
the sweetest recollections of the past When 
the bookman reads the various suggestions for 
a holiday which are encouraged in the daily 
newspapers for commercial purposes about 
the month of July, he is vastly amused by their 
futility, and often thinks of pointing out the 
only holiday which is perfectly satisfying. It 
is to have a week without letters and without 
visitors, with no work to do, and no hours, 
either for rising up or lying down, and to 
spend the week in a library, his own, of 
course, by preference, opening out by a level 
window into an old-fashioned garden where 
the roses are in full bloom, and to wander as 
he pleases from flower to flower where the 
spirit of the books and the fragrance of the 
roses mingle in one delight. 

Times there are when he would like to hold 
a meeting of bookmen, each of whom should 
be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to in- 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 27 

vite Cosmo Medici, who was as keen about 
books as he was about commerce, and accord- 
ing to Gibbon used to import Indian spices 
and Greek books by the same vessel, and that 
admirable Bishop of Durham who was as 
joyful on reaching Paris as the Jewish pilgrim 
was when he went to Sion, because of the 
books that were there. " O Blessed God of 
Gods, what a rush of the glow of Pleasure 
rejoiced our hearts, as often as we visited 
Paris, the Paradise of the World! There we 
long to remain, where on account of the great- 
ness of our love the days ever appear to us 
to be few. There are delightful libraries in 
cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing 
greenhouses of all sorts of volumes, there aca- 
demic meads, trembling with the earthquake 
of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, 
there the promontory of Parnassus and the 
Porticoes of the Stoics. " The Duke of Rox- 
burgh^ and Earl Spencer, two gallant sports- 
men whose spoils have enriched the land; 
Monkbarns also, though we will not let him 
bring any antiquities with him, jagged or 
otherwise; and Charles Lamb, whom we shall 
coax into telling over again how he started 
out at ten o'clock on Saturday night and 



28 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

roused up old Barker in Covent Garden, and 
came home in triumph with " that folio Beau- 
mont and Fletcher," going forth almost in 
tears lest the book should be gone, and coming 
home rejoicing, carrying his sheaf with him. 
Besides, whether Bodley and Dibdin like it 
or not, we must have a Royalty, for there were 
Queens who collected, and also on occasions 
stole books, and though she be not the great- 
est of the Queenly bookwomen and did not 
steal, we shall invite Mary Queen of Scots, 
while she is living in Holyrood, and has her 
library beside her. Mary had a fine collec- 
tion of books well chosen and beautifully 
bound, and as I look now at the catalogue it 
seems to me a library more learned than is 
likely to be found even in the study of an ad- 
vanced young woman of to-day. A Book of 
Devotion which was said to have belonged to 
her and afterwards to a Pope, gloriously 
bound, I was once allowed to look upon, but 
did not buy, because the price was marked in 
plain figures at a thousand guineas. It would 
be something to sit in a corner and hear Monk- 
barns and Charles Lamb comparing notes, 
and to watch for the moment when Lamb 
would withdraw all he had said against the 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 29 

Scots people, or Earl Spencer describing with 
delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle 
of the Sale. But I will guarantee that the 
whole company of bookworms would end in 
paying tribute to that intelligent and very 
fascinating young woman from Holyrood, 
who still turns men's heads across the stretch 
of centuries. For even a bookman has got a 
heart. 

Like most diseases the mania for books is 
hereditary, and if the father is touched with 
it the son can hardly escape, and it is not even 
necessary that the son should have known his 
father. For Sainte-Beuve's father died when 
he was an infant and his mother had no book 
tastes, but his father left him his books with 
many comments on the margins, and the book 
microbe was conveyed by the pages. " I was 
born," said the great critic in the Consola- 
tions, " I was born in a time of mourning; my 
cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father 
left me his soul, mind, and taste written on 
every margin of his books." When a boy 
grows up beside his father and his father is in 
the last stages of the book disease, there is 
hardly any power which can save that son, 
unless the mother be robustly illiterate, in 



30 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

which case the crossing of the blood may make 
him impervious. For a father of this kind 
will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing 
him to play beside him in the bookroom, 
where the air is charged with germs (against 
which there is no disinfectant, I believe, ex- 
cept commercial conversation), and when the 
child is weary of his toys will give him an old 
book of travels, with quaint pictures which 
never depart from the memory. By and by, 
so thoughtless is this invalid father, who has 
suffered enough, surely, himself from this dis- 
ease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels 
of books, reeking with infection, and explain 
to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or 
show him the thickness of the paper and the 
glory of the black-letter in an ancient book. 
Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken 
ill and begun on his own account to prowl 
through the smaller bookstalls, his father will 
listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in 
the evening, and will chuckle aloud when one 
day the poor victim of this deadly illness 
comes home with a newspaper of the time of 
Charles II., which he has bought for three- 
pence. It is only a question of time when that 
lad, being now on an allowance of his own, 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 31 

will be going about in a suit of disgracefully 
shabby tweeds, that he may purchase a The- 
ophrastus of fine print and binding upon 
which he has long had his eye, and will be 
taking milk and bread for his lunch in the 
city, because he has a foolish ambition to ac- 
quire by a year's saving the Kelmscott edition 
of the Golden Legend. A change of air 
might cure him, as for instance twenty years' 
residence on an American ranch, but even then 
on his return the disease might break out 
again: indeed the chances are strong that he 
is really incurable. Last week I saw such a 
case — the bookman of the second generation 
in a certain shop where such unfortunates col- 
lect. For an hour he had been there browsing 
along the shelves, his hat tilted back upon his 
head that he might hold the books the nearer 
to his eyes, and an umbrella under his left 
arm, projecting awkwardly, which he had not 
laid down, because he did not intend to stay 
more than two minutes, and knew indeed, as 
the father of a family, that he ought not to be 
there at all. He often drops in, for this is 
not one of those stores where a tradesman hur- 
ries forward to ask what you want and offers 
you the last novel which has captivated the 



32 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

juicy British palate; the bookman regards 
such a place with the same feeling that a phy- 
sician has to a patent drug store. The dealer 
in this place so loved his books that he almost 
preferred a customer who knew them above 
one who bought them, and honestly felt a pang 
when a choice book was sold. Never can I 
forget what the great Quaritch said to me 
when he was showing me the inner shrine of 
his treasure-house, and I felt it honest to ex- 
plain that I could only look, lest he should 
think me an impostor. " I would sooner 
show such books to a man that loved them 
though he couldn't buy them, than a man who 
gave me my price and didn't know what he 
had got." With this slight anecdote I would 
in passing pay the tribute of bookmen to the 
chief hunter of big game in our day. 

When the bookman is a family man, and I 
have sometimes doubts whether he ought not 
to be a celibate like missionaries of religion 
and other persons called to special devotion, 
he has of course to battle against his tempta- 
tion, and his struggles are very pathetic. The 
parallel between dipsomania and bibliomania 
is very close and suggestive, and I have often 
thought that more should be made of it. It 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 33 

is the wife who in both cases is usually the suf- 
ferer and good angel, and under her happy 
influence the bookman will sometimes take 
the pledge, and for him, it is needless to say, 
there is only one cure. He cannot be a mod- 
erate drinker, for there is no possibility of 
moderation, and if he is to be saved he must 
become a total abstainer. He must sign the 
pledge, and the pledge must be made of a 
solemn character with witnesses, say his poor 
afflicted wife and some intelligent self-made 
Philistine. Perhaps it might run like this: 
" I, A. B., do hereby promise that I will never 
buy a classical book in any tongue, or any 
book in a rare edition ; that I will never spend 
money on books in tree-calf or tooled mo- 
rocco ; that I shall never enter a real old book- 
shop, but should it be necessary shall pur- 
chase my books at a dry goods store, and there 
shall never buy anything but the cheapest re- 
ligious literature, or occasionally a popular 
story for my wife, and to this promise I sol- 
emnly set my hand." With the ruin of his 
family before his eyes, or at least, let us say, 
the disgraceful condition of the dining-room 
carpet, he intends to keep his word, and for a 
whole fortnight will not allow himself to en- 



34 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

ter the street of his favourite bookshop. 
Next week, however, business, so he says at 
least, takes him down the street, but he re- 
members the danger, and makes a brave effort 
to pass a public-house. The mischief of the 
thing, however, is that there is another public- 
house in the street and passing it whets the la- 
tent appetite, and when he is making a brave 
dash past his own, some poor inebriate, com- 
ing out reluctantly, holds the door open, and 
the smell is too much for his new-born virtue. 
He will go in just for a moment to pass the 
time of day with his friend the publican and 
see his last brand of books, but not to buy— ^ 
I mean to drink — and then he comes across 
a little volume, the smallest and slimmest of 
volumes, a mere trifle of a thing, and not dear, 
but a thing which does not often turn up, and 
which would just round off his collection at 
a particular point. It is only a mere taste, 
not downright drinking; but ah me, it sets him 
on fire again, and I who had seen him go in 
and then by a providence have met his wife 
coming out from buying that carpet, told her 
where her husband was, and saw 7 her go to 
fetch him. Among the touching incidents of 
life, none comes nearer me than to see the 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 35 

bookman's wife pleading with him to remem- 
ber his (once) prosperous home and his (al- 
most) starving children. And indeed if there 
be any other as entirely affecting in this prov- 
ince, it is the triumphant cunning with which 
the bookman will smuggle a suspicious brown 
paper parcel into his study at an hour when 
his wife is out, or the effrontery with which 
he will declare, when caught, that the books 
have been sent unbeknown to him, and he sup- 
poses merely for his examination. For, like 
drink, this fearsome disease eats into the very 
fibre of character, so that its victim will prac- 
tise tricks to obtain books in advance of a rival 
collector, and will tell the most mendacious 
stories about what he paid for them. 

Should he desire a book, and it be not a 
king's ransom, there is no sacrifice he will not 
make to obtain it. His modest glass of Bur- 
gundy he will cheerfully give up, and if he 
ever travelled by any higher class, which is 
not likely, he will now go third, and his top- 
coat he will make last another year, and I do 
not say he will not smoke, but a cigar will now 
leave him unmoved. Yes, and if he gets a 
chance to do an extra piece of writing, be- 
tween 12 and 2 A. M., he will clutch at the op- 



36 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

portunity, and all that he saves, he will calcu- 
late shilling by shilling, and the book he pur- 
chases with the complete price — that is the 
price to which he has brought down the seller 
after two days' negotiations — anxious yet joy- 
ful days — will be all the dearer to him for 
his self-denial. He has also anodynes for his 
conscience when he seems to be wronging his 
afflicted family, for is he not gathering the 
best of legacies for his sons, something which 
will make their houses rich for ever, or if 
things come to the worst cannot his collecion 
be sold and all he has expended be restored 
with usury, which in passing I may say is a 
vain dream. But at any rate, if other men 
spend money on dinners and on sport, and 
carved furniture and gay clothing, may he not 
also have one luxury in life? His conscience, 
however, does give painful twinges, and he 
will leave the Pines Horace which he has 
been handling delicately for three weeks, in 
hopeless admiration of its marvellous typog- 
raphy, and be outside the door before a happy 
thought strikes him, and he returns to buy it, 
after thirty minutes' bargaining, with perfect 
confidence and a sense of personal generosity. 
What gave him this relief and now suffuses 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 37 

his very soul with charity? It was a date 
which for the moment he had forgotten and 
which has occurred most fortunately. To- 
morrow will be the birthday of a man whom 
he has known all his days and more intimately 
than any other person, and although he has 
not so high an idea of the man as the world is 
good enough to hold, and although he has 
often quarrelled with him and called him 
shocking names — which tomcats would be 
ashamed of — yet he has at the bottom a 
sneaking fondness for the fellow, and some- 
times hopes he is not quite so bad after all. 
One thing is certain, the rascal loves a good 
book and likes to have it when he can, and per- 
haps it will make him a better man to show 
that he has been remembered and that one per- 
son at least believes in him, and so the book- 
man orders that delightful treasure to be sent 
to his own address in order that next day he 
may present it — »as a birthday present — to 
himself. 

Concerning tastes in pleasure there can be 
no final judgment, but for the bookman it may 
be said, beyond any other sportsman, he has 
the most constant satisfaction, for to him there 
is no close season, except the spring cleaning 



38 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

which he furiously resents, and only allows 
one in five years, and his autumn holiday, but 
then he takes some six handy volumes with 
him. For him there are no hindrances of 
weather, for if the day be sunshine he taketh 
his pleasure in a garden, and if the day be 
sleet of March the fireside is the dearer, and 
there is a certain volume — Payne's binding, 
red morocco, which was a favourite colour of 
Payne's — and the bookman reads Don 
Quixote with the more relish because the 
snow-drift is beating on the window. During 
the hours of the day when he is visiting pa- 
tients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable 
length, or dictating letters about corn, or com- 
posing sermons, which will not always run, 
the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour 
which will lengthen into one hundred and 
eighty minutes, when he shall have his re- 
ward, the kindliest for which a man can work 
or hope to get. He will spend the time in the 
good company of people who will not quarrel 
with him, nor will he quarrel with them. 
Some of them of high estate and some ex- 
tremely low; some of them learned persons 
and some of them simple, country men. For 
while the bookman counteth it his chief hon- 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 39 

our and singular privilege to hold converse 
with Virgil and Dante, with Shakespeare and 
Bacon, and such-like nobility, yet is he very 
happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Dandie 
Dinmont, with Mr. Micawber and Mrs. 
Gamp; he is proud when Diana Vernon 
comes to his room, and he has a chair for 
Colonel Newcome ; he likes to hear Coleridge 
preach, who, as Lamb said, " never did any- 
thing else," and is much flattered when 
Browning tries to explain what he meant in 
Paracelsus. It repays one for much worry 
when William Blake not only reads his Songs 
of Innocence but also shows his own illustra- 
tion, and he turns to his life of Michael 
Angelo with the better understanding after he 
has read what Michael Angelo wrote to Vit- 
toria Colonna. He that hath such friends, 
grave or gay, needeth not to care whether he 
be rich or poor, whether he know great folk 
or they pass him by, for he is independent of 
society and all its whims, and almost inde- 
pendent of circumstances. His friends of 
this circle will never play him false nor ever 
take the pet. If he does not wish their com- 
pany they are silent, and then when he turns 
to them again there is no difference in the wel- 



40 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

come, for they maintain an equal mind and 
are ever in good humour. As he comes in 
tired and possibly upset by smaller people 
they receive him in a kindly fashion, and in 
the firelight their familiar faces make his 
heart glad. Once I stood in Emerson's room, 
and I saw the last words that he wrote, the 
pad on which he wrote them, and the pen with 
which they were written, and the words are 
these: " The Book is a sure friend, always 
ready at your first leisure, opens to the very 
page you desire, and shuts at your first fa- 
tigue." 

As the bookman grows old and many of his 
pleasures cease, he thanks God for one which 
grows the richer for the years and never fades. 
He pities those who have not this retreat from 
the weariness of life, nor this quiet place in 
which to sit when the sun is setting. By the 
mellow wisdom of his books and the immortal 
hope of the greater writers he is kept from 
peevishness and discontent, from bigotry and 
despair. Certain books grow dearer to him 
with the years, so that their pages are worn 
brown and thin, and he hopes with a Birming- 
ham book-lover, Dr. Showell Rogers, whose 
dream has been fulfilled, that Heaven, having 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 41 

a place for each true man, may be " a book- 
man's paradise, where early black-lettered 
tomes, rare and stately, first folios of Shake- 
speare, tall copies of the right editions of the 
Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, un- 
cropped, uncut, and unfoxed in all their ver- 
dant pureness, fresh as when they left the 
presses of the Aldi, are to be had for the ask- 
ing." Between this man at least and his books 
there will be no separation this side the grave, 
but his gratitude to them and his devotion 
will ever grow and their ministries to him be 
ever dearer, especially that Book of books 
which has been the surest guide of the human 
soul. " While I live," says one who both 
wrote and loved books and was one of our 
finest critics," while I live and think, nothing 
can deprive me of my value for such treasures. 
I can help the appreciation of them while I 
last and love them till I die, and perhaps if 
fortune turns her face once more in kindness 
upon me before I go, I may chance, some 
quiet day, to lay my overheating temples on 
a book, and so have the death I most envy." 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 

AS a writer on any subject is apt to have 
a partial mind, I desire to clear myself 
at once from all prejudice by offering 
to my judicial readers the assurance of my 
profound conviction that a sense of humour 
is a hindrance to practical success in life, but 
of course they will notice the qualified form 
of my statement. To have an eye for the re- 
curring comedy of things, so that no absurdity 
of speech or incident escapes, is a joy to the 
individual, sustaining him wonderfully amid 
the labours and stupidities of life, and very 
likely it is also a joy to his friends, who have 
learned from him to use the wholesome medi- 
cine of laughter. But if you come to one's 
daily calling and make the two exceptions of 
literature and caricature in Art, who has not 
suffered through the affliction of humour? If 
the humorist, and I am not now speaking of 
a merely jocose person, but of one who has a 
real palate for comedy, happens to be a clergy- 
man, then he runs the greatest risk in his as- 

45 



46 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

sociation with good people, for with a few ex- 
ceptions, which are only tolerated and apolo- 
gised for, this class will say things in all seri- 
ousness which such a man will not be able to 
resist, and one brief break-down may ruin his 
character for life. He will be afraid to at- 
tend a religious meeting, lest some worthy 
speaker, having raised his audience to the 
highest pitch of pious expectation, should top- 
ple over into an anti-climax; and funerals 
will be to him a double trial, because comedy 
lies so near to tragedy. It gets upon this poor 
man's nerves when a neighbour whom he has 
seen coming along the street, round-faced and 
chirpy, enters the room with an expression of 
dolorous woe, shakes hands with the under- 
taker instead of the chief mourner, and is 
heard to remark with much unction and a sigh 
which stirs the atmosphere, " There to-day 
and here to-morrow, much missed." One un- 
happy clergyman still blushes with shame as 
he recalls an incident of his early days when, 
in a northern city, he was sent to take a funeral 
service in the kitchen of a workingman's 
house. They sat round him, eight Scots ar- 
tisans, each in his Sunday blacks, with his pipe 
projecting from his waistcoat pocket, and his 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 47 

hat below his chair, looking with awful, im- 
movable countenance into the eternities. It 
seemed irreverent to speak to any one of the 
graven images, but the poor minister required 
to know something about the man who had 
died, and so he ventured to ask the figure next 
him in a whisper what the deceased had been? 
Whereupon the figure answered with a loud, 
clear voice, " I dinna ken myself, for I jest 
came here wP a friend," and then, addressing 
a still more awful figure opposite, and in a 
still more aggressive tone, " Jeems, what was 
the corpse to a trade? " After which the 
trembling minister wished he had left the mat- 
ter alone. 

Will a medical man be acceptable to that 
large class of patients who love to speak of 
their ailments and have nothing wrong with 
them, if they discover that he is laughing at 
them, and especially if he allows himself the 
relief of sarcasm? Is it not better for his in- 
come, if not for his science, that he should be 
able to listen with a murmur of sympathy to 
old ladies of both sexes describing their symp- 
toms, and prescribe the most harmless of mix- 
tures with an owl-like countenance, beseeching 
them not to lose heart, even in such desperate 



48 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

circumstances, and departing with the assur- 
ance that he is at their service night and day, 
and must be sent for instantly if the coloured 
water gives no relief? They say two Roman 
Augurs could not look at one another without 
laughing, but how much more ought to be 
pitied the consultant and the general practi- 
tioner who meet over the case of a hypochon- 
driac? 

I challenge any one to mention a politician 
of our time who, on the whole, has not lost, 
rather than gained, through humour; and I 
fancy no man should be more afraid of this 
tricky gift than a leader of the democracy. 
Had Mr. Gladstone possessed the faintest 
sense of the ridiculous amid the multitude of 
his rich and brilliant talents, he had not been 
able to address a crowd from the window of 
his railway carriage, and receive a gift of a 
plaid, or a walking-stick, or, if my memory 
does not fail me, a case of marmalade, until 
his outraged fellow-passengers, anxious to 
make connections, insisted the train should go 
on, and it departed to the accompaniment of 
the statesman's eloquent peroration. But it 
was just because Mr. Gladstone could do such 
things, and was always in the most deadly 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 49 

earnest, that the people trusted him and hung 
upon his words. Nothing was so dangerous 
a snare to Lord Beaconsfield as his abounding 
and delightful humour, for it lodged in the 
minds of the English people a suspicion 
which never departed, that that brilliant man, 
who had been so farseeing in his ideas and an- 
ticipations of the trend of events, was little 
else than a charlatan and a scorner; and I 
fancy that Lord Salisbury's most devoted fol- 
lowers would have been glad if some of his 
mordant jests had never passed beyond his 
study. Is there not another most accom- 
plished and attractive personality in politics 
who has forfeited the chance of supreme au- 
thority, partly no doubt by a pronounced in- 
dividualism, but partly also by a graceful 
lightness of touch and allusion which are not 
judged consistent with that fierce sincerity 
which has been the strength of his party? 
Toleration is never without a flavour of hu- 
mour, but humour is an absolute disability to 
fanaticism. With this genial sense of human- 
ity no man can be a fanatic, and in a recent 
book on French crime it is frequently men- 
tioned that the principal miscreants were in- 
tense persons with no humour, so that in this 



50 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

branch of life, quite as much as in politics, the 
humorous person is severely handicapped. 
One feels as if his money and his life were safe 
in the hands of a person who can enjoy an hon- 
est jest, but this may only prove that the per- 
son is lacking in that determination and enter- 
prise which are conditions of practical suc- 
cess in a strenuous modern community. 

So far as a layman in such affairs can judge, 
humour is alien to the business mind, and 
would forfeit any character for stability. 
The looker-on, who, of course, may be a very 
foolish person, is amazed at the substantial 
success of dull men and the respect in which 
they are held, and he is equally amazed at the 
suspicion with which bright men, whose con- 
versation sparkles and enlivens, are regarded 
and the slight esteem in which they are held. 
The former may be wooden to the last point of 
exasperation, but his neighbours pronounce 
him to be solid, and thrust him into director- 
ships, chairmanships, the magistracy and Par- 
liament, and after a long course of solidity 
and success, with increasing woodenness, he 
will likely reach the House of Lords. But 
the other man, with whom you spent so pleas- 
ant an evening, and who is as much at home 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 51 

among books as " a stable-boy among horses," 
is apt to be judged light metal — a person 
who may know his Shakespeare, but could not 
be trusted with things of value like money. 
There are times when one loses heart and al- 
most concludes that the condition of tangible 
success in English life is to be well-built, giv- 
ing a pledge to fortune in a moderate stout- 
ness, to have a solemn expression of face, sug- 
gesting the possession of more wisdom than is 
likely to have been given to any single person, 
to be able to hold one's tongue till some in- 
cautious talker has afforded an idea, and to 
have the gift of oracular commonplace. If 
to such rare talents can be added an im- 
pressive clearance of the throat, there are few 
positions in Church or State, short of the high- 
est, to which their owner may not climb. My 
advice, therefore, to younger men, if indeed 
I am expected to give advice to anybody, is to 
congratulate themselves that by the will of 
Providence they have been cleansed from this 
dangerous quality, or, if this be not their for- 
tunate case, to hide the possession of humour 
behind a mask of sustained impenetrable com- 
mon sense. 

Having made this explanation, to protect 



52 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

both my subject and myself, I come to the 
analysis of humour and would remind you of 
its immense variety. It was, I think, George 
Eliot who said that nothing was a more seri- 
ous cause of diversion than incompatibility in 
humour, and this observation may also remind 
us that we ought to be most catholic in our 
judgment of humour. It is fair to argue that 
the complexion of humour in different coun- 
tries can be referred, like many other things, 
to the climate, and it were unfair to expect 
the same quality from a Scot, brought up un- 
der the grey skies and keen east wind and aus- 
tere buildings of Edinburgh, as from a 
Frenchman, nurtured amid the brightness and 
gaiety of Paris, where the spirit of France is 
at its keenest if not its strongest. If one de- 
sired to pluck the finest flower of humour — 
the rare and delicate orchid of this garden — 
I mean wit, he must go to France and French 
letters. In the French novelists and journal- 
ists, but especially in the essayists, whether 
he desire its more caustic form in Pascal, or 
prefer it lighter and more cynical in Roche- 
foucauld, one learns how swift and subtle, 
how finished and penetrating is the spirit of 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 53 

wit. Matthew Arnold, perhaps through his 
devotion to French literature, and Mr. Birrell 
through his native genius, proved that wit has 
not been unknown in the English essays, that 
fine form of literature whose decay always 
means the decay of culture ; and Charles Lamb 
was often so happy in his wit (it came more 
nearly sometimes to the English fun), and 
knew how dangerous it was to have a humor- 
ous reputation, that he used to say, " Hush! 
look solemn. A fool is coming." 

But it may be frankly admitted that wit is 
not acclimatised in England, and that its 
flavour is not often tasted in English litera- 
ture; for instance, the following conversation 
would hardly have been possible in London. 
Two men were driving along a Boulevard of 
Paris in an open carriage : one, the host, a suc- 
cessful and sensible person, and the other light 
and clever; and the conversation of the mil- 
lionaire grew so ponderous that the other 
could endure it no longer. He laid his hand 
upon his host's arm and with the other pointed 
to a man standing under a tree and just within 
the furthest range of human vision. The man 
was yawning, not with the restraint of polite 



54 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

society, but with the open enjoyment of our 
canine friends. "Look!" said the bright 
man, in his despair, " and I pray you silence. 
We are already overheard." This seems to my 
poor judgment so perfect an instance of wit 
that I do not supplement it from literature, 
though I do not offer it for indiscriminate use. 
It is indeed a story which divides the sheep 
from the goats, and you must take care to 
whom you tell it. Once, in magnifying the 
esprit of the French, I offered this to a lady 
at dinner as an illustration, and she promptly 
replied, " If that be all you can say for French 
wit, I do not see much in it." I was desolated 
not to have had the approval of her taste, and 
ventured to ask wherein my poor story had 
failed. " Well, for one thing," this excellent 
lady, full of common sense and good works, 
replied, " How could the man hear at that 
distance?" Then, as Matthew Arnold said 
about Benjamin Franklin, one knew the limits 
of triumphant common sense, and as I had 
been taught in the days of long ago never to 
put any lady to confusion, it only remained to 
confess that I had never thought of that, and 
to thank her for her correction. But I was 
fully aware that she would only be the more 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 55 

firmly convinced that the French people and 
myself were condemned in one abyss of stu- 
pidity. 

If, however, wit be one of the few uncon- 
sidered trifles which the English people have 
not picked up in their world mission of civili- 
sation, we may congratulate ourselves upon the 
loss, for no humour is more futile and more 
dangerous for practical purposes. Wit is the 
inhabitant of clubs and literary salons; it is 
the child of cloistered culture, not of the stir- 
ring market-place. Pity the candidate for 
public suffrages who should employ this 
tricky weapon. Suppose he give his best 
point the keen edge of wit, it will doubtless 
touch a handful in the crowd, and they will 
flash back a quick response to him, but the 
other ninety-nine per cent, who have felt noth- 
ing will conclude there is a conspiracy be- 
tween him and a few superior people to insult 
them and shut them out, and they will regard 
the speaker with silent resentment, as one who 
has spoken in cypher to a few. You need not 
expect any man's vote or any man's favour if 
you have innocently suggested that he is a fool 
and beneath your notice. And I dare to say 
that nothing is more unpopular, as nothing is 



56 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

more undemocratic, than wit, which is the 
aristocracy of humour. The most democratic 
form of humour, and by that I mean the form 
which affects the largest number of people in 
the shortest space of time and carries them the 
farthest distance, is the characteristic humour 
of England which we call by the old-fashioned 
name of fun. Fun has no marked intellec- 
tual quality, and makes no demand upon the 
hearer save that he be not cynical or misan- 
thropical. It is a sense of the obvious com- 
edy of life, its glaring contrasts, its patent ab- 
surdities, its ridiculous mistakes, its mirth- 
provoking situations. It is the humour of the 
public schools, of the railway carriage, of the 
market-place, and of the playroom. It is like 
the air-bells which dance upon the surface of 
the water and relieve the blackness beneath. 
With a touch of fun a speaker can win his 
audience to his side, a master can sweeten his 
relations with his workmen, a clever person 
who could make good fun might even stop a 
riot; and where there is fun a father and his 
sons are bound to get on together. Fun has 
lent a certain geniality and jolliness to Eng- 
lish life, and it has saved public life from that 
rancorous bitterness which, as Mr. Bodley 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 57 

points out in his admirable France, disfigures 
French politics. Had there been more hon- 
est and wholesome fun in the North, Scottish 
life, both in the home and in the Church, 
would not have been so grave and contro- 
versial. This popular humour in its play on 
words has its best exponents in Sydney Smith 
and Tom Hood. When one recalls how 
Smith told the little girl that she might as 
well pat the roof of St. Paul's Cathedral in 
order to please the Dean and Chapter as 
stroke the shell of a tortoise in order to please 
it, and how Hood was given a wine-glass of 
ink instead of his black draught, and promptly 
offered to swallow a piece of blotting-paper 
as an antidote, one is simply selecting at 
random from the bag two specimens of good 
English fooling. The Pickwick Papers zf- 
ford a very carnival of rollicking humour in 
incident, and with their plea for charity have 
done more than a multitude of sermons to 
cheer and sweeten English life. Whatever 
may be said by superior persons who always 
apologise for laughing, it is a good thing that 
the people should be moved from time to time 
to pure and kindly laughter, and when a mob 
laughs after the English fashion the police 



58 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

may be withdrawn, and when a nation takes 
to laughing at folly, then folly, whether in- 
tellectual or moral, has lost half its danger. 
In Art one has pleasure in citing our admir- 
able Punch, which through a long career has 
sustained an honourable tradition of purity 
and dignity, and I dare to say we ought to be 
thankful for the service our caricaturists have 
rendered to the amenities both of public and 
private life. Our English humour may be 
simple, as a Frenchman or an American al- 
lows himself to suggest, but it has its own ad- 
vantage. If one compares Punch with the 
daring illustrated papers of Paris, he will 
have a fresh appreciation of purity, and be 
thankful that what we laugh at in England 
can be laid upon our family table. And if he 
compares Mr. Punch with the exceedingly 
clever caricaturists of America, he will have 
a new idea of English good-nature, and be 
thankful for artists who still believe in the ro- 
mance of marriage and the beauty of simple 
emotions. No one, for instance, can examine 
the work of Dana Gibson, the American 
" black and white" artist, without being im- 
pressed both by its intellectual subtlety and 
by its artistic finish. But he must also be de- 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 59 

pressed by the constant suggestion of the 
weakness, the sordidness, the hypocrisy, and 
the hopelessness of human society. French 
and American caricatures tend to lower one's 
temperature, but English caricature in its 
master hands tends to raise one's heart, and 
to inspire one with faith in his fellow-crea- 
tures. English humour may prick delusions, 
but it spares us our dreams ; it may play round 
a wilful peculiarity, it never jeers at an ir- 
reparable calamity; it may exhibit the foibles 
of humanity, it has a tear ready for its sor- 
rows. It is the humour of a people which has 
not yet lost faith in God and man, which is 
not yet convinced that the law of life is a nerv- 
ous scramble for gold ; it is a humour which 
can give a hard blow, but always with the 
fist and never with a stiletto, and forgets the 
fight the moment it is over. Long may it 
flourish in English life and English homes, 
a check on absurdity of every kind, a cure for 
melancholy, an incentive to humanity. 

The Duke of Wellington was a good John 
Bull in all his ways, and had his hours when 
he enjoyed a bit of fun and found it not un- 
useful. Louis Philippe introduced one of the 
Marshals of the Peninsular War to our Iron 



60 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

Duke. They had met before but not in 
Courts, and the Marshal, with a keen recol- 
lection of his experiences at the hands of the 
Duke, forgot the perfect manners of his peo- 
ple and his own generosity. He refused, it is 
said, to shake hands with his former oppo- 
nent, and even allowed himself to turn his 
back and to walk towards the door. The 
King apologised profusely to the Duke for the 
Marshal's discourtesy, but the Duke only 
laughed with a big, hearty English laugh, 
and, looking at the Marshal's retreating 
figure with keen delight, said to His Maj- 
esty, " Forgive him, Sire. I taught him that 
lesson! " 

When one passes from England to Ireland, 
he finds himself in a country which has bred 
a humour of its own — a plant which cannot 
be grown in any other soil, and whose very 
origin cannot be traced. Nothing can be 
found on the face of the earth so captivating 
and irresistible, so unexpected and unreason- 
able, as Irish drollery. It seems as if Nature, 
in creating that charming people, had in- 
vested them with all kinds of bewitching 
qualities, and then had been pleased, by way 
of a merry jest and that the world might not 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 61 

grow too solemn, to have inverted the Irish 
intellect so that it stands upon its head and 
not upon its feet, which, of course, is the cause 
of bulls and all the other quips and cranks of 
the Irish spirit. If any one is still young 
enough to stand upon his head in his familiar 
room, he will get a view of the place perfectly 
novel and surprising, different from anything 
he could have seen when standing on his feet, 
and the account he will give of that room will 
startle every person by its originality. In 
like fashion it has been given to the Irish 
mind to have an outlook on life absolutely its 
own, to go into Wonderland with Alice, and 
to live in a topsy-turvy world where in truth, 
to quote an older classic, " the dish runs off 
with the spoon, and the cow jumps over the 
moon." If the just and honourable, but per- 
haps also over-sensible and somewhat phleg- 
matic persons, who have in recent times had 
charge of Irish affairs, and have been trying 
to unravel the tangled skein, had appreciated 
the tricky sprite which inhabits the Irish 
mind, and had made a little more allowance 
for people who are not moved by argument 
and the multiplication table, but are touched 
by sentiment and romance as well as vastly 



62 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

tickled by the absurdity of things, they might 
have achieved greater success, and done more 
good to a chivalrous, unworldly, quick-witted, 
and warm-hearted people. 

Lever, beloved by schoolboys in past days 
and by many other people, admirably repre- 
sents in fiction this gay, incalculable, irrespon- 
sible humour (who has not rejoiced in Micky 
Free?), and he is also supported by many a 
short story teller, such as the author of Father 
Tom and the Pope, which appeared in Maga 
in the days when the Blackwood circle was 
the admiration of the land. Some pessimists 
fear that the excessive devotion of the Irish 
people to politics in recent days, who are as 
delightfully illogical there as in other depart- 
ments, has had a depressing effect upon their 
minds, and that we need no longer expect the 
springs of Irish humour to make green the 
wilderness. But this is taking too dark a 
view of affairs. The Irish priest and the 
Irish resident magistrate, and sometimes even 
the tourist in Ireland, is still refreshed from 
time to time, and goes on his way rejoicing. 
It is not so long ago that an Irish peasant 
dreamt he was visiting the late Queen Vic- 
toria, and was asked by the Queen what he 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 63 

would like to drink. When he expressed the 
humble wish for a glass of the liquor associ- 
ated with the name of Jamieson, and when the 
Queen, still full of hospitality, wanted to know 
whether he would take it hot or cold, he was 
foolish enough to prefer it hot. As the kettle 
was not boiling, Her Majesty in the dream 
hastened to make up the fire with her own 
hands, while her thirsty and loyal Irish sub- 
ject waited anxiously. Alas ! when the water 
came to the boil, the noise of the steam awoke 
him. " Holy St. Patrick! " he said, with in- 
finite regret, " I'll take it cold next time." 
So far as I know, the Irishman is still living 
who was sent by his master with a present of 
a live hare to a neighbour. The hare es- 
caped and the servant made no effort to pur- 
sue it, but that was not for the reason which 
would have affected a Scotsman, that he could 
not have caught it, but for another reason 
which could only have occurred to the Irish 
mind, but to that mind was absolutely satis- 
factory: "Ye may run and run and run, ye 
deludhering baste, but it's no use, for ye 
haven't got the address." 

Various pleasant tales have been going 
round about that genial Irish Judge who died 



64 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

a few years ago, and whose death diminishes 
the gaiety of at least one nation, but I have 
not seen it mentioned how he explained the 
working of a new Act which lowered the 
qualification for Grand Jurymen. " I will 
tell you," he said, in his charming brogue, 
" what happened at the first Assize I took 
afterwards. I gave my usual charge to the 
Grand Jury, and I said, 'Gentlemen, you will 
be pleased to take your accustomed place in 
the Court,' and I give you my word for it, ten 
of them went instantly into the dock." Nor 
am I sure any one has placed on record a play 
on words which it were an insult to call a 
11 pun," and which crosses the border of the 
brightest wit. A man was tried for an 
agrarian murder and witnesses swore that they 
had seen him commit it, and there was, in fact, 
no doubt of his guilt; but the jury promptly 
brought him in " Not Guilty." Whereupon 
the counsel for the prosecution asked the 
judge whether such a verdict could be law. 
" I am not prepared," said the judge, cl to call 
it law, but I am sure it is jurisprudence." 
And it is only an Irish Member of Parlia- 
ment who could congratulate an honourable 
baronet, who had bored the House with an 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 65 

interminable harangue, upon three things. 
First, " upon speaking so long without stop- 
ping"; second, " upon speaking so long with- 
out saying anything "; and thirdly, " upon sit- 
ting down on his own hat without his head 
being in it." 

It is natural to cross from Ireland to Amer- 
ica, but it is not easy to estimate the humour 
of our kinsmen, because, although we know 
what it has been, we are not sure what it is 
going to be. If environment gives the com- 
plexion to thought, then one understands why 
the American jests should be on a large scale, 
ranging from Artemus Ward, who did so 
much to delight us all and died in early man- 
hood, to Mark Twain, who lived to complete 
a task of the highest honour. But it is a ques- 
tion whether the permanent humour of that 
bright people, whose brain as much as their 
atmosphere seems charged with electricity, 
will not approximate in the end to the Sal 
Atticum of France, as their women's talk and 
dresses remind one of Paris. Any one who 
reads Life, I mean the American Punch, can 
recall a dozen instances of wit as finished, 
as caustic and, I regret to say, sometimes as 
profane as any in French modern letters. It 



66 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

seems as if American humour were between 
the tides with the old school of the Bigelow 
Papers and the Innocents Abroad closing its 
happy career and the new school hardly yet 
in evidence. American humour at least illus- 
trates one characteristic of this hustling mod- 
ern time; it is suggestive rather than exhaus- 
tive, and never can be anticipated. Our 
fathers not only endured but welcomed stories 
the end of which they could see from the be- 
ginning; they honoured every intermediate 
station with a preparatory laugh, and when 
the train finally entered the terminus fell al- 
most into an apoplexy, and then, when they 
had recovered, were willing, and almost ex- 
pected that the train should be taken out and 
make another entry, or perhaps two, and in 
every case it would be received with fresh ap- 
probation. This obvious jocosity is now in- 
tolerable; the modern demands brevity and 
surprise, that stories should, in fact, be con- 
structed with a certain amount of art. The 
modern indeed believes that while Nature in 
the shape of an incident belongs to all, its ar- 
tistic representation in the shape of a picture 
is copyright, and that if a man has worked on 
a story without which it is indeed not worth 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 67 

hearing, he ought to be protected in his rights. 
An old scholar whom I know holds that there 
are only ten stories, and have only been ten in 
human history, and that they can all be found 
as protoplasm in the Greek comedians, and 
that all the other stories are only evolutions, 
skilful cross-breedings or adaptations to en- 
vironment. Nothing, at any rate, is more in- 
teresting from a technical point of view than 
to see how a master in the craft will clothe the 
barest skeleton of fact with flesh and blood, 
or how, to vary the situation, he will take an 
old house that has fallen into disrepair, and, 
by throwing out a window here and a wing 
there, by re-facing and re-painting and very 
often, in the case of old stories, attending care- 
fully to the sanitation (which was very bad 
in some stories of the past), will astonish us 
with a new house. The Americans are mas- 
ters in the art of construction, and provided 
you are not in the secret it would be a very 
shrewd person who could tell where the story 
is to land him. 

As, for instance, a lawyer is briefed to de- 
fend a man charged with murder and discov- 
ers that his client's case is almost hopeless. 
Anxious to do his best, however, he interviews 



68 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

a genial Irishman who follows the calling of a 
professional juryman, and pledges him to be 
on duty when this case is tried. " And re- 
member," said the lawyer, " whatever the 
other jurymen want, you bring in a verdict of 
manslaughter." Next day the evidence is 
even worse than could have been imagined, 
and the jury are so long in coming back the 
lawyer is afraid that justice has miscarried. 
But at last they return with the arranged ver- 
dict of manslaughter. When the lawyer 
called in the evening to recompense his ally, 
he asked him what in the world had kept the 
jury so long. " I never was shut up with 
eleven such obstinate men in my life " (a very 
ancient jest, mark you, introduced merely as 
a foil) — " I never was shut up with eleven 
such obstinate men in my life. They were 
going to bring in the prisoner ' Not Guilty. 7 " 
Before identifying the humour of the Scot, 
which is a province by itself with a clearly- 
marked frontier, it must be remembered that 
there are two distinct races within the nation 
of Scotland, and that although they have come 
under the conformity of one land and largely 
of one creed, yet the Scots Highlander and 
the Scots Lowlander are quite opposite types ; 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 69 

they share neither their virtues nor their vices. 
The Lowlander, the man of Fifeshire or of 
Ayrshire, is self-controlled, far-seeing, per- 
severing, industrious, with a genius for the 
accumulation of money. He fulfils the con- 
ditions of success in the modern world, and 
like " jingling Geordie " in the Fortunes of 
Nigel, who was the pioneer of his race in suc- 
cessful emigration, he gathers money wher- 
ever he goes, and would make a fortune on a 
desert island. But our Highlander is impul- 
sive, imaginative, gallant to a fault, and re- 
gardless of consequences, pure in life, cour- 
teous in manner, chivalrous in ideals. He was 
at home in the world which is dying, and 
made the best of raiders and fighting soldiers, 
as he was the most loyal of clansmen and the 
child of lost causes, dwelling amid his moun- 
tains and by the side of sea lochs in a country 
of mists and weird, lonely moors, dominated 
for centuries by a severe and unbending creed. 
Fun and wit were impossible for him, and 
yet under his sombre countenance struggled 
something of the ineradicable humour of the 
Celt. His humour, so far as it can be defined, 
is a kind of solemn and long drawn-out 
waggery which he tastes without a smile, and 



70 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

of which one would suppose that he is some- 
times unconscious. 

" Who had this place last year? " asked a 
shooting tenant of his keeper. 

11 Well," said Donald, " I'm not denying 
that he wass an Englishman, and he wass a 
good man, oh yes, and went to kirk and shot 
fery well. But he wass narrow, fery nar- 
row." 

"Narrow," said the tenant in amazement, 
for the charge was generally the other way 
about. " What was he narrow in? " 

" Well," said Donald, " I will be telling 
you, and it wass this way. The twelfth w r ass 
a fery good day and we had fifty-two brace, 
but it wass warm, oh yes, fery warm, and 
when we came back to the lodge the gentle- 
man will say to me, l It iss warm,' and I will 
not be contradicting him. Then he will be 
saying, ' You will be thirsty, Donald/ and I 
will not be contradicting him. Then he will 
take out his flask and be speaking about a 
dram, and I will not be contradicting him but 
will just say, c Toots, toots.' And then when 
the glass wass half full I will say, just for po- 
liteness, l Stop,' and he stopped. Oh yes, a 
fery narrow man! " In fact, as Donald sug- 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 71 

gested, a mere literalist, held in the bondage 
of the letter and without the liberty of the 
spirit. 

Another tenant was making arrangements 
for the coming winter before he went South, 
and told the keeper to get the woman who had 
looked after the lodge the previous winter to 
take charge of it again. 

" You will be meaning Janet Cameron, but 
I am not advising you to have Janet this year. 
Oh, no! it will maybe be better not to have 
Janet this winter." 

" Why, what was wrong with her? " and 
then, with that painful suspicion of the High- 
lander which greatly hurts his feelings, " Did 
she drink? " 

" Janet," replied Donald with severity, " iss 
not the woman to be tasting. Oh, no ! she iss 
a good-living woman, Janet, and has the true 
doctrine, but I will not be saying that you 
should have her." 

" I see. So you and she, I suppose, 
quarrel?" 

" It iss not this man who will be quarrelling 
with Janet Cameron, who iss his wife's cousin 
four times removed, and a fery good woman, 
though she be a Cameron." 



72 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

" Well, ask her to take the lodge, and offer 
her the same wages as last year, and a little 
more, if that will please her, and tell me what 
she says." 

11 It iss not for wages Janet Cameron will 
work; oh, no! that iss not the kind of woman 
Janet iss, and it iss no use asking her, for she 
will not come." 

"Well," said the Englishman, getting 
nettled, " do as you are bid and give her the 
chance, at any rate, and tell me what she says." 

" No, sir, it will be wasting my time going, 
and I will not be asking her." Then, after a 
pause, " Ye would maybe not be knowin' that 
Janet iss dead? " 

Does any one say with impatience, why did 
he not tell that at once? If you can answer 
that question you can lay bare the secret of the 
Celtic mind, which is the most complex thing 
in psychology. An Englishman's idea of con- 
versation is a straight line, the shortest dis- 
tance between two points, but a Celt's idea is 
a circle, a roundabout way of reaching the 
same place. He has so long been stalking 
deer, and other people, that the habit has 
passed into his mind, and conversation be- 
comes a prolonged stalk in which he is con- 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 73 

sidering the wind and the colour of the hill- 
sides, and avails himself of every bush, and 
then comes suddenly upon his prey. His 
mind is so subtle that he dislikes statements 
of downright brutality and prefers to suggest 
rather than assert, and the following is surely 
a guarded delicacy of suggestion : 

" Why, Hamish," said the Laird to a young 
fellow whom he met on the road, " what are 
you doing here? Have you left the situation 
I got for you? " 

" It is a great sorrow, sir, to this man, but I 
could not be staying in that place, and so I 
have just come back, and maybe I will be get- 
ting something else to do." 

" Look here, I don't understand this," said 
the Laird. " Was the work too heavy, or did 
they not pay you enough wages? Tell me 
what ailed you at the place." 

" I would be ashamed to complain of work, 
and there was nothing wrong with the wages ; 
but it was just this way, and though I'm mak- 
ing no complaint, maybe you will be under- 
standing. There was a sheep died on the hill 
of its own accord, and the master had it salted 
and we ate that sheep. By-and-by there was 
a cow died suddenly, and we did not know 



74 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

what was wrong with her, but the master had 
that cow salted and we ate her. And then the 
master's mother took ill, and we were feeling 
very anxious, for we will not be forgetting the 
sheep and the cow. And the master's mother 
died, and I left." 

Upon the English habit of a straight ques- 
tion and a straight answer in the briefest form 
of words, you can get no information in the 
Highlands. If, for instance, you desired to 
know whether the minister of a parish were 
a man of high character and good preaching 
gift, you would have to introduce your in- 
quiry after a long conversation on things in 
general, and then to mix it up with a multi- 
tude of detail, and when the other man had 
replied the words he used would in themselves 
be quite useless for quotation, but you would 
have found out his mind. One of our most 
distinguished Highland ministers, who under- 
stood his race through and through, desired 
to know whether a certain candidate for a 
parish had approved himself to the people 
and was likely to be appointed. He called 
upon one of the religious worthies of the dis- 
trict, being perfectly certain that if he found 
out his private opinion he would know the 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 75 

position. Duncan knew quite well why the 
minister had come, and the minister knew that 
Duncan knew, but they talked on the weather 
and the crop, and the last heresy case, and the 
spread of false doctrine in the Lowlands, for 
half-an-hour. After that they came as it 
were by accident on the name of the candidate, 
and Duncan simply covered him with praise. 
The minister knew that that counted for noth- 
ing. A little later the minister said to Dun- 
can, " I would like to have your mind about 
that young man " — ■ his mind, you notice, be- 
ing very different from his speech. Then 
Duncan delivered himself as follows: 

11 Yesterday I wass sitting on the bank of the 
river, and I wass meditating, when a little boy 
came and began to fish. He wass a pretty 
boy, and I am judging wass fery well brought 
up. He talked fery nicely to me, and had the 
good manners. He had a fery nice little rod 
in his hand, and he did not fling his line badly. 
It wass fery pleasant to watch him. But it 
wass a great peety that he had forgot to put 
a hook on the end of the line, for I did not 
notice that he caught many fish, but he wass 
a fery nice boy, and I liked him fery much. 
And it iss a great mercy that we are getting 



76 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

good weather for the harvest, for we are not 
worthy of such goodness, with all our sins and 
backslidings." 

Then the minister knew that that candidate 
would not get the parish, but Duncan was en- 
titled to say that he had never mentioned the 
candidate's name, or said a single word 
against him. 

It may seem, perhaps, that the range of hu- 
mour in its various kinds is exhausted, and 
that no distinctive form is left for Scotland; 
in which case it would be the first time that 
Scotland has not had her share in the division 
of spoil. As a matter of fact, there is one hu- 
mour that has not been touched, which may 
not be the brightest, nor the subtlest, nor the 
kindliest, but which is the strongest and most 
telling of all. It is that humour which came 
to a height in Old Testament Scripture, when 
a Hebrew prophet set himself down to the 
elaborate, merciless, unanswerable mockery of 
idolatry. When he describes the idolater, re- 
solving to add a new god to the furniture of 
his house, and anxious, like an economical 
man, that this new piece of furniture should 
be an heirloom to his children, choosing a tree 
that will not rot, making a contract with a 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 77 

clever artisan in the god-making trades, and 
then dropping in to see the progress of his 
work, watching the wood measured off, the 
workmen resting after their labour on the 
hard material, the finishing of the thing, and 
then the inaugural feast when he worships the 
god that has been made out of a log, and cooks 
the feast with the shavings which are over, so 
that one part of the tree gives him his god and 
the other his dinner. It is a humour which 
scorches like flaming fire and bites like vitriol. 
And to this humour the Scot has been heir 
in modern literature and life. The Satires of 
Horace and even of Juvenal pale before the 
unlicensed ridicule of Sir David Lindsay of 
the Mount before the Reformation, and one 
cannot mention a history seasoned with such 
contemptuous mockery as Knox's famous His- 
tory of the Reformation in Scotland. Burns's 
Holy Willie and Carlyle's Latter-day Pam- 
phlets show how permanent and how virile is 
this spirit of hot indignation and sombre sar- 
casm in the genius of the Scots people. 

It has been difficult for a Scot to forgive the 
good-natured and superficial English hu- 
morist who not only denied to the Northern 
folk any sense of humour, but enshrined his 



78 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

charge in a too memorable surgical illustra- 
tion ; but the Scot is much comforted with the 
reflection that if he has not always arisen to 
the play of simple jocosity or the jingle of a 
pun, this has only been that he preferred hu- 
mour of a severer and intellectual kind. The 
Scots are a serious people, with an admirable 
gravity of mind and a keen literary con- 
science, and their nature does not allow them 
to take humour so lightly and irresponsibly as 
their Southern neighbours. If a jest calls at 
an English door, and especially if he be 
dressed with an obvious simplicity, then it re- 
ceives a ready welcome, and if the walls of the 
house be also extremely Southern the people 
next door will know their neighbour has been 
amused, and next day the worthy man will be 
introducing his jest in public conveyances, 
and even impressing it upon friends with his 
thumb. It is impossible not to admire this 
childlike simplicity of nature, this willingness 
to be amused on easy terms, but it is not the 
blame of the Scot that his brain is somewhat 
more complicated and that his demands are 
more exacting. When a jest calls at a Scot's 
door, he is inclined to look out at the upper 
window and to inquire if it be a jest at all ; but 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 79 

if he is finally convinced that it is no pre- 
tender, which may not be for four-and-twenty 
hours of careful examination, none will give 
the visitor more hearty welcome. Even then 
he may not laugh, but may indeed look more 
serious than before; but surely, if there be a 
sorrow too deep for tears, there may be a hu- 
mour too high for laughter, and in the very 
earnestness of the Scot's face under the enjoy- 
ment of a joke you have a proof of the sincer- 
ity of his tribute to humour. 

If fun be a sense of the delightful comedy 
of things, irony, the humour of the Scots, is 
a sense of the underlying tragedy of things, of 
the contradictions and mysteries of life, which 
have in them a sad absurdity. It is the sport 
of the immortals. From this irony he never 
quite escapes, and his humour therefore can 
never have the gay abandonment and rollick- 
ing exuberance of Southern people, but will 
always be somewhat austere and restrained, 
and move in the shadow rather than in the 
light. The helplessness of men in the hands 
of Almighty and inscrutable powers is always 
present to the Scots mind and is a check upon 
gaiety. If in a thoughtless moment you con- 
gratulate a Scots mother upon her child with 



80 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

some freedom of speech, saying, " What a 
bonnie bairn that is," the anxious mother will 
instantly reply, " Her face is well enough if 
her heart was right, but for ony sake be quiet, 
for there's no sayin' what may happen. I 
never saw a height without a howe." There 
is a phrase common on Scots tongues which 
illuminates the background of the Scots mind, 
and is not intended to be profane, because it 
is felt to be true. Any extravagance of 
speech or any permissible satisfaction with 
success is called a tempting of providence. 
The idea is that if we walk humbly and 
quietly the unseen powers will leave us alone, 
poor creatures of a day, but if we lift our little 
heads and make a noise, the inclination to 
strike us down will be irresistible. 

No man comes off so well at a wedding as 
an Englishman, but none is so ill at ease at a 
funeral, while a Scotsman has no freedom at 
a marriage, since he does not know how the 
matter may end, but he carries himself as to 
the manner born, with an admirable dignity 
and gravity, at a funeral. If it be not a para- 
dox to say it, he delights in funerals and counts 
them one of the luxuries of life, for our 
piquant sensations may be got from sorrow as 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 81 

readily as from joy. Upon the ceremonies 
and the regulations of funerals he is an author- 
ity, and is both very learned and very sensi- 
tive. 

11 Peter," says one mourner to his neighbour 
at the tail of a walking funeral, " div ye see 
Jamie Thompson walking in the front, side by 
side wi' the chief mourner, and him no a drop 
o' blood to the corpse? " 

" Fine I see him, a forward, upsetting am- 
beetious body; he would be inside the hearse 
if he could," — the most awful and therefore 
most enviable position for a sober-minded 
Scot. 

According, therefore, to the Scots idea, it 
is more profitable to go to a funeral than to a 
wedding, and anything that would detract 
from the chastened satisfaction of such an oc- 
casion is deeply resented. And the following 
conversation between a dying wife and her 
husband would only be possible in Scot- 
land: 

11 IVe been a guid wife to you, John, a' thae 
years." 

" I'm no denying Jean, ye hev'na been a 
waster. I'll admit ye hae been economical, 
and verra attentive to the calves and hens." 



82 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

11 Ye'll no refuse me, then, my last re- 
quest? " 

" I will'na, Jean, if it's reasonable, but will 
hear it first." 

" Well, my mither has taken a terrible no- 
tion o' gaein' to the funeral, and I canna get 
her off it. Noo, John, will ye promise to hev 
her wi' ye in the first coach? " 

" Oh ! wooman, ask somethin' else. I 
canna do that." 

" But, John, I'll never ask onything else 
o' ye. Ye micht pit up wP her, juist for my 
sake." 

" Weel, Jean, if you put it that way, I sup- 
pose I maun agree; but I tell you plainly, 
yeVe spoiled the pleasure of the day for me." 

It is recorded in an ancient history that 
there was once a heresy trial, when men were 
going to be sentenced unto death for denying 
the orthodox doctrine of the Mass^ — well-liv- 
ing men, but, no doubt, heretics. Before sen- 
tence was passed one of the prisoners, who 
had been wearied with many questions, 
thought that he might in turn ask one of the 
judges a question. " My Lord Bishop," he 
said, " how many wives have you? " As his 
Lordship should not have had one even, it 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 83 

was a very searching question, and his Lord- 
ship was not prepared with an answer, nor 
were the other judges anxious to be questioned 
on their domestic affairs. 

There went up from the crowd, it is told, 
a " sair lauch," as they thought of the bitter 
mockery of the situation, that such judges 
should be condemning harmless men, free- 
born Scots also, mark you, to death for differ- 
ing on a mystery no one could understand ; at 
the moral and logical contradiction of 
it all the spectators sent up their laugh to 
Heaven. Not the genial, happy laugh of an 
English crowd tickled by a bit of simple fun 
from judge or bar, but the fierce raillery of 
men insulted in reason and outraged in con- 
science. The men who laughed were not to 
be trifled with, and their Lordships judged 
it best to let the prisoners go, that day at least, 
for when the Scots mob, the most resolute and 
dangerous to be found anywhere, begins to 
laugh, it is time for tyrants to hide themselves 
behind iron doors and the swords of armed 
men, and even then neither they nor their 
strongholds might be safe, for this laugh is 
stronger than steel. 

There is therefore no humour so dry and 



84 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

stringent, with such a bite upon the palate, as 
that of Scotland, and if there be any bit of it 
more grim than this, I should like to hear it. 
An unhappy Scot was condemned to death, 
after a careful trial, for the murder of his wife 
under circumstances of considerable provoca- 
tion, and the verdict was no doubt a just one. 
There is something good, however, in every 
man if you walk around him long enough to 
find it, and his counsel was so much interested 
in his client that he visited him in the con- 
demned cell. 

" There is no hope, Robertson, of a re- 
prieve," said the advocate frankly, " and you 
know you don't deserve it; but if there is any- 
thing else I can do for you, just tell me." 

" Well," said Robertson, " I count it very 
friendly to give me a cry like this, and if ye 
could get me one thing, I would feel easier 
on the occasion " — which was a rather felici- 
tous name for the coming function. " Could 
ye get me ma Sabbath blacks? for I would like 
to wear them." 

" Well," said the advocate, u I daresay I 
could. But what in the world, Robertson, do 
you want to wear your Sabbath clothes for on 
the . . . occasion?" 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 85 

11 1 thought maybe you would see that for 
yourself, sir. Just as a mark of respect for 
the deceased." 

But I should not wish to part with Scots 
humour in such a sombre atmosphere as that 
of my last illustration, and the following 
is lighter, though still touched beneath the 
surface with the sense of the awfulness of 
life. 

Among all the ministers of the Scots Kirk 
perhaps the most characteristic of the last gen- 
eration was Dr. Norman Macleod, the chap- 
lain of Queen Victoria and the friend of every 
person in Scotland. Working-men turned 
to look at him as he went down the street, say- 
ing one to another, " There goes Norman. 
He's looking well the day." And when the 
people strip off a man's title and call him 
among themselves by his Christian name, then 
his place is in the people's heart. 

One day the minister of the next parish to 
that of Dr. Macleod was sent for to see a 
working-man who was dangerously ill. 
After he had visited him in his bedroom, he 
came into the kitchen to have some conversa- 
tion with the man's wife. 

11 Your husband is very low. I hope he 



86 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

may be spared. I am afraid it's typhus 
fever." 

" Aye, aye," the wife replied, with mourn- 
ful pride. " It's no ordinary trouble." 

11 1 didn't know your husband's face, and I 
didn't want to ask him questions. Do you 
attend St. Luke's Church?" 

" Na, na," with a fine flavour of contempt 
both for St. Luke's and its minister; u we gang 
to Norman's." 

"Well, that's all right; you couldn't go to 
a better. But why did you send for me? " 

" Losh bless ye, sir! div ye think that we 
wad risk Norman wi' typhus fever? " 

Whether humour be grim or gay, there are 
certain conditions by which it ought to be 
bound in the judgment of all right-thinking 
folk. It must not be profane, tearing down 
with a clown's hand the veil which hides the 
holiest of all in human life, and turning life's 
great mystery into a petty comedy. It must 
not be unclean, bringing the blush to the cheek 
of modesty, or offending the taste of self-re- 
specting people. It must not be cruel, put- 
ting the simple to confusion or wounding 
those who, through their disabilities, suffer 
enough already. It must be used to brighten 
the day and make us forget the tedium of the 



HUMOUR: AN ANALYSIS 87 

journey; to give us a better understanding of 
life and its infinite varieties ; gentle to chasten 
innocent foolishness and sharply to rebuke 
wilful evil-doing. Humour must also be kept 
in its own place and not be allowed to rob 
life of its seriousness or speech of its dignity; 
and we may all lay to heart the story with 
which George Eliot concludes her timely es- 
say on " Debasing the Moral Currency " : — 
11 The Tirynthians, according to an ancient 
story reported by Athenaeus, becoming con- 
scious that their trick of laughter at every- 
thing and nothing was making them unfit for 
the conduct of serious affairs, appealed to the 
Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The 
god prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, 
which would be effective if they could carry 
it through without laughing. They did their 
best, but the flimsy joke of a boy upset their 
unaccustomed gravity, and in this way the 
oracle taught them that even the gods could 
not prescribe a quick cure for a long vitiation, 
or give power and dignity to a people who, in 
a crisis of the public well-being, were at the 
mercy of a poor jest.'' 



ROBERT BURNS: THE VOICE OF 
THE SCOTS PEOPLE 



ROBERT BURNS: THE VOICE OF 
THE SCOTS PEOPLE 

WHEN one writes on Robert Burns 
with the hope of interesting Scots 
people, one is embarrassed by this 
double difficulty that the subject of this article 
presents so many different points of interest, 
and the audience to whom it is addressed is es- 
sentially though justly critical. Both diffi- 
culties point to the same solution, and assist a 
writer in bringing his subject to a focus. I 
do not, therefore, propose to discuss the tech- 
nique of Burns's poetry, as, for instance, his 
metres, or to go into the history of his poems, 
as, for instance, tracing some of them in their 
ballad form, or to assign him his place in gen- 
eral literature, or to review the work which 
he did in English verse and prose. I shall 
confine myself to one point, and shall speak of 
Burns as the outcome of the Scots spirit, as the 
representative of Scots character, as the Lyric 
Poet of Scots life, as being as nearly as pos- 
sible the voice of the Scots people. Scotland 

91 



92 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

both in her strength and in her tenderness, 
Scotland with her virile virtues and her virile 
faults, not the handful of people at the top of 
society, not the refuse at the base, not the saints 
of Scotland, not her rascals either, but the na- 
tion, as the nation is, and the nation has done, 
and the nation has felt, and the nation has suf- 
fered, that Scotland speaks out in Burns. He 
was with emphasis a Scotsman, and stands 
more perfectly for Scotland than any other 
writer of the first order. When he wanders 
into English verse or into English letter writ- 
ing, he is not himself. " These English songs 
gravel me to death. I have not the command 
of the language that I have of my native 
tongue, in fact I think that my ideas are more 
barren in English than in Scotch. I have 
been at ' Duncan Gray ' to dress it in English, 
but all I can do is desperately stupid." Some 
of his literary friends at one time advised him 
to compose in English lest he should cut him- 
self off from the larger public, but both Mr. 
William Wallace, for whose admirable im- 
partial life of Burns every Scotsman and 
every reading man should be most thankful, 
and Matthew Arnold, for whose estimate of 



ROBERT BURNS 93 

Burns Scotsmen at least are not quite so grate- 
ful, both agree that in the English poems we 
have not the real Burns. The real Burns is 
the Burns who speaks the Scots dialect. 

For the first feature in Burns which one 
faces is the hardness of his life from beginning 
to end. " Scarcely ever," says M. Taine, 
" was seen together more of misery and of tal- 
ent. He was born January 1759, amid the 
hoar-frost of a Scottish winter, in a cottage of 
clay built by his father, a poor farmer of Ayr- 
shire — a sad condition, a sad country, a sad 
lot. It is hard to be born in Scotland, it is so 
cold there," concludes the Frenchman. 
Well, it has been bracing cold and has made 
strong men, but one may sadly admit it was a 
cold country for Burns ; from his birth to his 
death he might be said to have lived and died 
in hoar-frost. One inevitably places Burns 
side by side with Scott, because the two com- 
pletely represent Scotland upon all her sides 
and through all her traditions. Scott is pos- 
sibly the finest character Scotland has ever 
produced, a gentleman without reproach and 
full of charity, and to him Tennyson paid a 
just tribute — 



94 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

" Oh ! great and gallant Scott, 

True gentleman, heart, blood, and bone, 
I would it had been my lot 

To have seen thee and heard thee and known." 

Before Scott died he suffered cruelly and 
through suffering came to his height; but 
Scott belonged to the class which is largely 
shielded from hardship : he was not born into 
the lot of the common people, and did not 
taste of their cup. That cup Burns drank to 
its dregs. The difference between English 
and Scots character may be referred among 
other causes to the bitter struggle which the 
Scots race have had with their soil and with 
their climate. Mr. Benjamin Swift says, 
" The Scotsman expects the worst, even from 
God . . .," while " the Englishman sees 
no reason for doubting that the Union Jack 
is flying at the gates of heaven." Whatever 
was arduous in life or in religion Burns ex- 
perienced, as he toiled six days of the week 
and heard u black Jock Russel " thundering 
eternal woe on the seventh. He was brought 
up in a home where the wolf was ever at the 
door; he served as a ploughman in his early 
years; he was unsuccessful as a farmer; he 
had finally a poorly paid post in the Excise; 



ROBERT BURNS 95 

he never knew the meaning of ease; at one 
time it seemed likely that he would have to 
emigrate; he had frequently to borrow from 
his friends; he was afraid lest his body should 
be seized for debt, and after his death a sub- 
scription was raised for his wife and children. 
He suffered at the hands of his father, whose 
nature was soured by adversity; and he was 
insulted by his future father-in-law, who did 
not judge him worthy of his daughter. He 
was disappointed of posts he wished to obtain, 
and he was badly treated by people who 
ought to have been kind to him. There was 
hardly any care or humiliation of common 
life which he did not share, and his life was 
one long toil from beginning to end, redeemed 
only by the affection of his wife and the loy- 
alty of a few friends. When Scott visited 
Ireland in his old age a woman begged alms 
of him, and when he did not immediately re- 
spond she made this plea, " I'm an ould strug- 
gle^" whereupon Scott turned. " An ould 
struggler," he said, " and so am I." 

Burns did not live to be old; he was worn 
out soon as many poets have been, but 
throughout his seven-and-thirty years he was 
a struggler. He had just one pure satisfac- 



96 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

tion and that was his work, the inspiration of 
his soul, and he has described his own battle 
and his own victory. 

" Now Robin lies in his last lair, 
He'll gabble rhyme, nor sing nae mair, 
Cauld poverty, wi' hungry stare, 

Nae mair shall fear him: 
Nor anxious fear, nor cankert care, 

E'er mair come near him. 

To tell the truth, they seldom fash't him, 
Except the moment that they crush't him; 
For sune as chance or fate has hush't 'em, 

Tho' e'er sae short, 
Then wi' a rhyme or sang he lash't 'em, 

And thought it sport. 

Tho* he was bred to kintra wark, 

And counted was baith wight and stark, 

Yet that was never Robin's mark 

To mak a man; 
But tell him he was learn'd and dark, 

Ye roos'd him than ! n 

Akin to the severity of Burns's circum- 
stances was the virility of his character. It 
has not been for nothing that the thistle was 
assigned to Scotland as her national emblem 
and the rose to England, for through all their 



ROBERT BURNS 97 

history the Scots people have been proud of 
their independence, jealous of every neigh- 
bour, rooted in their own ways, and difficult 
to coerce either in politics or religion. If 
they fought within their Kirk — and the Cal- 
vinists and Arminians certainly fought hard in 
Burns's day — they fought also for their Kirk 
and their Kirk for them. If they had some 
internal feuds in Scotland, they joined to- 
gether almost as one man against their " auld 
enemie," England. The Scots have been a 
democratic people, and Burns is the poet of 
democracy. There are two perfect war pieces 
in existence, and in both the note is resistance 
to tyranny and the victory of liberty. They 
are not the jingoism of militarism, or the rant 
of the pot-house, they are the song of patriot- 
ism; one is "The Marseillaise," which cele- 
brated the deliverance of France from cruel 
and foul oppression under which neither the 
honour of a woman if she were poor nor the 
life of a man if he were a peasant was safe at 
the hands of the nobles, and the other is that 
war piece which Burns composed in a thun- 
derstorm, and which stirs the blood like the 
sound of pealing trumpets, " Scots, wha hae 
wi' Wallace bled." Burns was not an an- 



98 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

archist desiring to destroy the foundations of 
society, else he had not represented an orderly 
and law-abiding people, neither was he a 
cringing sycophant trembling before men of 
high estate. He believed that every man had a 
right to live and to think for himself, and that 
the standard of judgment must be not gold 
and silver, not titles and privileges, but mind 
and character, or as Burns calls them, sense 
and worth, and the very heart of the strong 
Scots folk beats in these verses — 

" A prince can mak a belted knight, 

A marquis, duke, and a' that; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 

Gude faith, he mauna fa' that! 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

Their dignities an' a' that; 
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, 

Are higher rank than a' that. 

Then let us pray, that come it may, 

(As come it will for a' that,) 
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth, 

Shall bear the gree, an' a' that. 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

It's comin' yet, for a' that, 
That Man to Man, the world o'er, 

Shall brothers be for a' that." 



ROBERT BURNS 99 

Tyranny for Burns was embodied and local- 
ised in the factor, who has possibly been more 
detested in Scots country life than either Laird 
or Lord or any other ruler. Burns never for- 
got the threatening and insolent epistles which 
his father used to receive from what he calls 
the Scoundrel Tyrant, and which Burns de- 
clares used to reduce the family to tears. He 
was living then by himself in " the cheerless 
gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a 
galley slave," and the u curse was clenched " 
by the hard hand of the factor. One under- 
stands what gave the spirit to " Scots wha 
hae " and a A man's a man for a' that." Burns 
is thinking of the humiliation and helplessness 
of a small farmer's home when the hand of 
the factor descends, and I do not know that 
the bitterness of the Scots heart when the coun- 
tryman is trembling for his home before the 
local tyrant has ever been better described than 
in one verse of " The Twa Dogs " — 

" Fve notic'd, on our laird's court-day, — 
An' mony a time my heart's been wae, — 
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, 
How they maun thole a factor's snash; 
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an' swear 
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear ; 



100 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

While they maun stan', wf aspect humble, 
An' hear it a\ an' fear an' tremble ! " 

One cannot read the story of the elder Burns's 
life, or Burns's own just protest against rural 
tyranny, without praying that the day may 
soon come when it will not be in the power 
of any man to close fifty homes at his will on 
a country side and drive forth fifty families of 
healthy, contented, loyal, God-fearing people, 
that the land be turned into a place of sport, 
and let for the amusement of some rich alien. 
There will never be perfect freedom in the 
land till the people be rooted on the soil, and 
the glens and straths of the land which God 
has given unto the nation for a heritage be 
studded with homes filled with country folk, 

" wonderfu' contented, 
An' buirdly chiels, an' clever hizzies." 

The Jacobitism of Burns, which appears in 
some of his most agreeable poems, such as 
"Wha hae we gotten for a king, but a. wee 
bit German lairdie," and " It w r as a' for our 
rightfu' king," is due partly to his heredity, 
since his people seem to have been out in the 
Fifteen, but partly of variant on the stern 



ROBERT BURNS 101 

and ineradicable independence of the Scots 
people. The Scots are logical in their the- 
ology and, although this may seem a paradox, 
logical in their politics, for they fought the 
Stuarts when they were in power, and then 
they fought for them when they were in exile. 
They could not abide either home tyranny or 
alien tyranny, and being a romantic people 
also, the most romantic royal house in history 
appealed to their imagination much more than 
the Hanoverian Georges. And Burns there- 
fore felt no inconsistency in singing the praises 
of the Stuarts in one poem and celebrating the 
spirit of the French Revolution in the next. 

Burns is distinguished even among poets 
by the breadth and depth of his sympathy, 
which indeed has no limits and no reserves. 
It has not been given to many to have a range 
which includes the " Cotter's Saturday 
Night," wherein Burns celebrates the excel- 
lence of simple family life — 

" To make a happy fireside clime 
To weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life " — 

and " The Jolly Beggars, 5 ' wherein he sings 



102 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

with utter abandonment the joys of Bohemian 
life. Whatever is human appeals to Burns as 
it did to Shakespeare, and therefore he num- 
bers his clients among all classes, Puritans and 
Cavaliers, strict livers and free livers together. 
In the simple annals of the poor there never 
has been painted a kindlier or purer interior 
than that poem whose model is " The Farmer's 
Ingle," by Fergusson, where the priest of the 
family offers the evening prayer to God — 

" The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; 
The sire turns o'er, with patriarchal grace, 

The big ha'-bible, ance his father's pride; 

His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, 
His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare: 

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 
He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
And ' Let us worship God ! ' he says with solemn air." 

And truly this is the highest side of Scots 
life — 

" From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad: 
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 
' An honest man's the noblest work of God.' " 

It was a genuine and sincere Burns who wTote 



ROBERT BURNS 103 

those words, and in writing them he celebrated 
one of the high virtues of his pebple. It was 
also the same Burns expressing himself who 
described that other interior in Poosie-Nan- 
sie's lodging-house, where the vagabonds, 
male and female, are gathered at their supper. 
In this poem Burns lets himself go, and there 
is no question he goes at a rattling pace. Many 
have considered " The Jolly Beggars " the 
strongest thing which Burns ever did, and it 
were difficult to mention a piece with such an 
irresistible swing and so much unreserved 
sympathy with unredeemed humanity. Upon 
this piece Matthew Arnold's balanced criti- 
cism may be accepted. In " The Jolly Beg- 
gars " there is more than hideousness and 
squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a 
superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, 
and power which make the famous scene in 
11 Auerbach's Cellar " of Goethe's Faust seem 
artificial and tame beside it, and which are 
only matched by Shakespeare and Aristoph- 
anes — 

" A fig for those by law protected! 
Liberty's a glorious feast! 
Courts for cowards were erected, 
Churches built to please the priest. 



104 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

Life is all a variorum, 

We regard not how it goes; 
Let them cant about decorum, 

Who have characters to lose." 

This one also knows is a side of life, even in 
the Scotland of the Covenanters. 

With nature in her every phase Burns's soul 
kept tune. With the daisy turned over by 
the plough on an April day, 

" Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r," 

in whose doom he sees the fate of an artless 
maid by love's simplicity betrayed, and the 
fate of a simple bard, 

" On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd ! " 

He feels for the field-mouse, whose little nest 
had been turned up by the plough, 

" Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie " ; 

and again he moralises in words better known 
than the perfect little poem itself — 

" But, Mousie, tfhou art no thy lane, 
In proving foresight may be vain; 



ROBERT BURNS 105 

The best-laid schemes o' mice and men 

Gang aft agley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 

For promis'd joy! " 

And he is furious as a wounded hare limps 
by which a fellow had shot —* 

" Go live, poor wand'rer of the wood and field, 
The bitter little that of life remains." 

He will write good-humouredly of a crea- 
ture which is not named in polite society, but 
which he detected airing itself upon a young 
lady's bonnet in the kirk, and he points the 
moral which is often quoted by people who do 
not know the subject of the poem — 

" O wad some power the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us ! 
It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 

An* foolish notion: 
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, 

An' ev'n devotion! " 

He has a kindly thought for saints and sinners, 
for beasts and men, for vermin and for out- 
casts, for witches, and even the enemy of us 
all is not outside his charity. And I will not 



106 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

say that Burns has not stirred an unconfessed 
echo in certain hearts with a last verse of his 
" Address to the Deil "— 

" But f are-you-weel, auld ' Nickie-ben ' ! 
O wad ye tak a thought an' men' ! 
Ye aiblfns might — I dinna ken — 

Still hae a stake: 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Ev'n for your sake ! " 

His sympathy with the wounded and the 
helpless was quite consistent with his merci- 
less satire of unreality and hypocrisy, and 
therein he was a true Scot, for irony is the 
characteristic form of Scots humour. One 
can taste it in the poets before the Reforma- 
tion, like Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, in 
Knox's History of the Reformation, and in 
modern days in Thomas Carlyle. The fla- 
vour is not wanting in Stevenson and Barrie, 
but there is only a faint suggestion in Scott, as 
for instance in that pious smuggling merchant 
of Redgauntlet. It is a pronounced and ap- 
petising trait in Scots literature, and survives 
pleasantly in a distinguished Edinburgh news- 
paper, which every Scotsman away from home 
reads with the greater relish because it has in 



ROBERT BURNS 107 

its columns a breath of the snell east wind. 
Whether it be Lindsay or Burns, the subject 
of satire in Scots letters is almost always the 
Kirk, and this is not because the Scots are ir- 
religious, or because the Kirk has been alien, 
but very largely because the Kirk has played 
such a part in the history of Scotland. The 
nation and the Kirk have been one, and the 
history of the people has been largely shaped 
by the Kirk; she has been a guardian of Scots 
liberty in many a crisis, but she has also been 
a very severe nurse of her children. The 
Kirk and Burns had their own special quarrel 
in which no one can justify the conduct of 
Burns, and it may be admitted that the Kirk 
was not very wise in her treatment of him. 
Apart, however, from any provocation which 
he gave to the guardian of morals in the land, 
the Kirk in the eighteenth century, or perhaps 
one may say conventional religion, presented 
two vulnerable points which a satirist could 
not resist attacking. Hypocrisy in its ele- 
mentary sense of the double life had been 
raised to the level of genius, when a man like 
Lord Grange spent days in affecting exercises 
of penitence before the sacrament, and other 
days in immoral orgies. An extreme Calvin- 



108 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

ism was also preached which was an offence 
both to the reason and to the conscience, and 
one can easily trace the connection between the 
high doctrine and the low morals, since many- 
were convinced that, as they were the elect of 
God's purpose, they could do as they pleased 
with His commandments. This was the na- 
tional scandal which Burns pilloried in his 
" Address to the Unco Guid," and his descrip- 
tion of the u Holy Fair," which was said to 
have been drawn to the life, and in the most 
biting piece that came from his pen, where 
indeed the parchment was the flesh of a man, 
"Holy Willie's Prayer." Rabbi Duncan 
used to say that there was only one heresy, and 
that was Antinomianism, which really means 
that if a man holds the right creed he may live 
any kind of life, and this destructive delusion 
was never scarified in literature with such final 
success as in the prayer offered by the sancti- 
monious and evil living Ayrshire elder. 

Antinomianism is pierced through the heart 
as with a dart when this worthless wretch lifts 
up his voice in all confidence — 

" O Thou, who in the heavens does dwell, 
Who, as it pleases best Thysel\ 
Sends ane to heaven an' ten to hell, 



ROBERT BURNS 109 

A' for Thy glory, 
And no for ony guid or ill 

They've done afore Thee! 



I bless and praise Thy matchless might, 
When thousands Thou hast left in night, 
That I am here afore Thy sight, 

For gifts an' grace 
A burning and a shining light 

To a' this place." 

With this severity there has always gone in 
Scots character an underlying tenderness, and 
one makes bold to say that Strong as Burns was 
in that fierce satire which played like a flame 
of fire round the moral faults of his people, he 
came to his height not in bitterness but in kind- 
ness, not in comedy but in pathos. Matthew 
Arnold, with all his fine insight, made several 
memorable mistakes in criticism, and I think 
he was not perfectly just in his treatment of 
Burns. He gives him a high place, allowing 
that although his " world of Scotch drink, 
Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against 
a poet," while the world of Chaucer is fairer, 
richer, more significant than that of the Ayr- 
shire poet, yet Burns " is by far the greater 
force," He insists, however, that Burns is 



110 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

wanting in that note of high seriousness which 
is the infallible mark of the great classics. 
Arnold admits that Burns is not deficient in 
the sense of the tears of things, and one would 
hold that he has established his place among 
those who have worthily and poignantly de- 
picted the tragedy of life in " Ae Fond Kiss, 
and then we sever," for has the vain regret 
ever been so perfectly expressed as in these 
lines — 

" Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 
Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 
Never met, or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted " — 

or in " Auld Lang Syne," especially in the 
two verses — 

" We twa hae run about the braes, 
And pu'd the gowans fine; 
But we've wander'd mony a weary foot 
Sin auld lang syne. 

We twa hae paidl'd i' the burn, 

From mornin' sun till dine; 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd 

Sin auld lang syne." 

It seems to me that in another poem which it is 
true Burns did not so much create as adapt, 



ROBERT BURNS 111 

and which is much less widely known, Burns 
comes quite as near to the heart of things as 
any man who ever wrote, and I think it is 
worth full quotation *=■=* 

" It was a for our rightfu' King 
We left fair Scotland's strand ; 
It was a' for our rightfu' King 
We e'er saw Irish land, 
My dear; 
We e'er saw Irish land. 

Now a' is done that men can do, 

And a' is done in vain ; 
My love and native land fareweel, 

For I maun cross the main, 
My dear; 

For I maun cross the main. 

He turn'd him right and round about 

Upon the Irish shore; 
And gae his bridle-reins a shake, 

With adieu for evermore, 
My dear; 

With adieu for evermore. 

The soger frae the wars returns, 

The sailor frae the main ; 
But I hae parted frae my love, 

Never to meet again, 

My dear; 

Never to meet again. 



112 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

When day is gane, and night is come, 

And a' folk bound to sleep; 
I think on him that's far awa\ 

The lee-lang night and weep, 
My dear; 

The lee-lang night and weep." 

Matthew Arnold, in spite of certain disabili- 
ties for the criticism of Burns, has done him 
on the whole so much justice that it may seem 
ungrateful to complain, but one must insist 
that if sincerity be the criterion of classical 
poetry, Burns is not wanting. 

Here one is tempted to turn aside from the 
main road and make a brief comparison be- 
tween Burns and that English poet who es- 
sayed the same task, and who owed himself so 
much to Burns. Wordsworth set himself to 
sing, " Of joy in widest commonalty spread," 
and he certainly has dealt with common life 
simply. There are those who object to poetry 
being mixed up with philosophy and on that 
account disparage Wordsworth, and there are 
those who profess themselves unable to dis- 
tinguish his poetry from prose, and who per- 
mit themselves to make play with Words- 
worth. On the other hand, a select number of 
fine minds, fine perhaps rather than strong, 



ROBERT BURNS 113 

have always taken Wordsworth for a prophet, 
and one critic firmly believes that the poetical 
performance of Wordsworth is, " after that of 
Shakespeare, the most considerable in our lan- 
guage from the Elizabethan age to the present 
time." 

Both Burns and Wordsworth dealt with 
country life, both wrote plainly, both pointed 
their moral, both had their message, and one 
need not ask which is the greater — it is 
enough for us to note the difference of tem- 
perament. Wordsworth's gentle meditative 
verse is like a garden lake with goldfish swim- 
ming in it, Burns's strong stirring lines like 
the mountain torrent carrying everything be- 
fore it. Wordsworth is a pleasure ground 
with simple flowers laid out in beds, but 
Burns is the mountain side with the billows of 
purple heather. One cannot forget that when 
Burns met Scott, who was only then a lad, the 
poet discerned coming greatness in him, and 
laying his hand upon his head conveyed to 
him the grace of literary succession. When 
Wordsworth visited Scott he received with 
much complacency Scott's generous tributes, 
but had not the heart to make any return. 
'And when Scott went out upon one of his 



114 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

rambles, Wordsworth remained in the house 
in order to listen to the reading of his own 
poems. Each poet has had his own reward; 
Wordsworth's mission has been to an esoteric 
circle of self-conscious cultured people and 
anaemic ecclesiastics, while Burns has been the 
poet of the people, and with his verse so arch, 
so winsome, so tender, so merry, has thrust a 
song into the mouth of the man who holds the 
plough and the woman who milks the cow. 
No nation has such love-songs as Burns has 
given Scotland in " My luve's like a red, red 
rose," cl The rigs o' barley," " Green grow the 
rashes, O! " " O whistle and I'll come to ye, 
my lad," " Comin' thro' the rye," besides 
many more, or such songs of pathos as " To 
Mary in Heaven," " Ye banks and braes o' 
bonnie Doon," " John Anderson, my Jo," and 
" Auld Lang Syne." It is his glory and his 
claim upon national gratitude that he has made 
a proud and reserved people articulate, and 
has taught them to sing their loves and their 
wars in lines which have few rivals in the 
lyric poetry of the world. 

When one is celebrating Burns, and espe- 
cially when touching on his love-songs, one 
remembers Lord Rosebery's words concerning 



ROBERT BURNS 115 

" the eternal controversy which no didactic 
oil will ever assuage, as to Burns's private life 
and morality." There are those who have 
done their best to minimise his faults, and I 
sympathise with the pious effort of Mr. Wil- 
liam Wallace in that direction, and there are 
those who dwell upon his faults with gusto, 
and that is why one resents certain passages in 
the appreciation of Burns which concludes the 
very scholarly edition of Henley and Hender- 
son. Why should Burns be specially selected 
for the pillory while the sins of other famous 
men are passed over? 

This is a question which Lord Rosebery 
very justly asks, but which he does not answer. 
Probably the causes for this unwelcome dis- 
cussion are, the close connection between 
Burns's poetry and his life, his poetry por- 
traying its most deplorable passages in auto- 
biography; and the other reason is that the 
Scots Kirk was in the eighteenth century a 
severe censor of morals, and Burns was not 
able to sin in private. There never were such 
Pharisees as in that century, and therefore 
there never was a more bold Bohemian than 
Burns. One does not wish to linger on the 
subject, but I would offer with diffidence two 



116 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

remarks, certainly not by way of apology for 
evil living, but in order to place Burns's char- 
acter in its right light. We cannot apply the 
same standard of judgment to every man, we 
must make some allowance for temperament, 
and especially for the rich and hot blood of 
poets from David to Burns. It would have 
been better without doubt for the world, for 
Jerusalem long ago, and for Ayrshire in the 
eighteenth century, if those two poets had been 
men of cold nature and prim respectability. 
They would not have sinned and they would 
not have suffered, and it is likely that they 
would not have written their masterpieces. 
Concerning their sinning one is inclined to 
quote the saying of a great Church Father re- 
garding the fall of man, " O beata culpa." 
The passion which sent Burns into the far 
country opened his mouth in song, which is 
one of the arresting paradoxes of human na- 
ture. 

One also would like to remind the public 
that Burns was not a sheer Bohemian, and 
to protest against the idea that unredeemed 
profligacy is a necessary condition of literary 
work. He was not a Scots Verlaine whose 
life was one course of foul living, abject pau- 



ROBERT BURNS 117 

perism, and occasional crime, varied by fits of 
remorse and a fine play of genius. Burns 
worked hard both in youth and manhood, he 
celebrated in undying verse the foolishness of 
sin and the virtues of domestic life. Amid a 
conflict of temptation he married Jean Ar- 
mour, and was on the whole a kind husband 
to her, and a good father to his children. The 
faults of his early youth were many, and he 
never was a model of flawless perfection, but 
he was true to the great tradition of Scotland 
in magnifying the home, and his own home 
he dearly loved. 

When one tries to estimate Burns's place, 
not in general literature, which is beyond the 
scope of this article, but in the Scots depart- 
ment, he has to guard against two ensnaring 
tendencies. One is so to emphasise his origi- 
nality as to leave him a solitary phenomenon 
— an Ayrshire ploughman who by miraculous 
inspiration suddenly opened his mouth and 
burst into undying song, a Melchizedec in lit- 
erature without father or mother, beginning 
or end of days. The other is to treat him as 
simply a ballad improver taking old Scots 
verses and setting them in order. In fact 
there is no man without an ancestry and few 



118 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

are without descendants. No great poet has 
ever been the echo of other people, and yet 
no great poet could detach himself from the 
past. Burns was, in the genuine sense of the 
Scots word for poet, " a maker." He 
brought a mind of singular freshness and a 
genius of marked individuality to his work. 
It is also true that there stretched behind him 
a line of Scots poets, writing in a dialect 
which connects them with Chaucer, Burns 
had his distant ancestry in Lindsay, 
Montgomery, and Dunbar, and his nearer 
forebears in Sempill, Allan Ramsay, and poor 
unfortunate Robert Fergusson, whose grave 
Burns watered with tears, and whose tomb he 
built. Many of Burns's finest poems are 
based on ballads which passed from mouth to 
mouth among the Scots people, just as Shake- 
speare obtained the plots of his plays from 
many quarters, and Chaucer reproduces Boc- 
caccio, while that great Italian was himself 
only a collector. As Burns has been justly 
censured for the coarseness of certain verses, 
let it be never forgotten that every ancient 
ballad which he touched he purified, so that 
much Scots song which otherwise would have 
to-day been buried out of sight, having passed 



ROBERT BURNS 119 

through Burns's hands like tainted water 
through a gravel bed, has flowed in purity 
into the main stream of literature. When 
Burns began to write, Scots literature was 
dead, for the brilliant Edinburgh school, 
Hume the philosopher, and Robertson the his- 
torian, and Blair the critic, were not writers of 
Scots literature, but Scotsmen in English lit- 
erature. Burns was the heir of the national 
tradition, and he also was its climax. Per- 
haps there one must correct himself: he relit 
the torch of vernacular speech, and he passed 
it on to Scott, ordained by Burns as his suc- 
cessor. 

One may never forget Burns's visit to Edin- 
burgh, which is always a superior city, but 
was then to the last degree high and mighty. 
I do not say that Edinburgh treated Burns 
badly, for it showed him much kindness, and I 
do not say that Burns did not impress Edin- 
burgh, for people never forgot his eyes, which 
glowed like coals of fire, and men like Dugald 
Stewart were enthusiastic about his conversa- 
tion. But one is immensely tickled by the at- 
titude of the Edinburgh critics to the Ayr- 
shire poet, which was one of good-natured pat- 
ronage. Dr. Hugh Blair, whose chief effort 



120 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

in criticism was affirming the authenticity of 
Macpherson's Ossian, and who was a figure of 
self-satisfied gentility, wrote a letter to Burns, 
which is altogether delightful, on the poet's 
return to Ayrshire. " You are now, I pre- 
sume/' says the old gentleman, " to retire to a 
more private walk of life, and I trust will con- 
duct yourself there with industry, prudence, 
and honour. In the midst of those employ- 
ments which your situation will render proper, 
you will not, I hope, neglect to promote pub- 
lic esteem by cultivating your genius." And 
so on, concerning which one can only remark, 
that the idea of Dr. Blair patting Burns on the 
back is prodigious. 

One is much interested in hearing Burns 
upon Blair. " In my opinion," says the poet, 
" Dr. Blair is merely an astonishing proof of 
what industry and application can do ; he has 
a heart not of the finest water, but far from be- 
ing an ordinary one; in short, he is a truly 
worthy and most respectable character." Ad- 
mirable! That was just Dr. Blair — " a most 
respectable character " ; and when it is remem- 
bered that Blair, besides many lucrative posts, 
such as minister of the High Kirk and Pro- 
fessor of Rhetoric in the University of Edin- 



ROBERT BURNS 121 

burgh, enjoyed a pension of £200 per year for 
his literary attainments, one wishes that Robert 
Burns had been as kindly treated. Poetry is 
not reckoned a remunerative form of litera- 
ture, and true poets are themselves rare. Why 
should any poet like Burns be left to toil and 
starve? One would not like to think of Burns 
as a poet laureate, a kind of higher servant at- 
tached to a palace, who comes at the summons 
of a bell, and takes directions about an ode on a 
birth or a marriage, but one would have been 
thankful if Pitt, who, as Lord Rosebery points 
out, passed on Burns " one of his rare and 
competent literary judgments," had placed the 
Scots poet beyond the reach of want, and since 
it was his lot to die young, had at least secured 
that Burns should have peace in his last days. 
But there is a just fate, and Blair had his 
good things in his own day and is now unread. 
Burns tasted little else but misery and now 
has come into his kingdom. " Don't be 
afraid," Burns said to his wife, " I'll be more 
respected a hundred years after I am dead 
than I am at present." The hundred years 
have more than passed, and Burns's hope has 
been more than fulfilled. While he lived 
Scotland had begun to love her chief poet, 



122 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

and now there is none born of woman, in her 
long history, whom Scotland loves more 
dearly, for Robert Burns was bone of her bone 
and flesh of her flesh. He shared the lot of 
the people to its last grain in his labours, his 
sufferings, his sorrows, his sins. He has told 
what the people think and feel, and love and 
hate. An imperfect man, a sinning and fool- 
ish man if you please, but one of the twelve 
great poets of the human race, and in every 
drop of his blood, and in every turn of his 
thought, the poet of Scotland. We remem- 
ber the joy he has brought to our lives, and the 
expression he has given to our sorrow. We 
remember how he stirs us as no other voice in 
poetry. And for the rest of it, to quote a 
passage of wise charity from a delightful book 
of letters published within recent years, " the 
most wholesome attitude is to be grateful for 
what in the way of work, of precept, of ex- 
ample these men achieved, and to leave the 
mystery of their faults to their Maker in the 
noble spirit of Gray's c Elegy ' — 

' No farther seek his merits to disclose, 

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode 

(There they alike in trembling hope repose), 
The bosom of his Father and his God.' " 



ROBERT BURNS 123 

Burns himself was ever anticipating his trial 
at the bar of human judgment, and he made 
his own irresistible plea for frail mortal man 
in the immortal words — 

" Then gently scan your brother Man, 

Still gentler sister Woman; 
Tho* they may gang a kennin wrang, 

To step aside is human: 
One point must still be greatly dark, 

The moving why they do it; 
And just as lamely can ye mark, 

How far perhaps they rue it." 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 

ENGLISH literature, with all its wealth 
of genius, does not afford another body 
of fiction so wide in its historical range, 
so varied in its types of character, so genial in 
its humanity as the series of romances which 
will be known while our speech lasts by the 
felicitous title of the Waverley Novels — 
felicitous not merely because it is a good- 
sounding word, but because in Waverley Scott 
struck the characteristic note of his fiction. 
From Waverley, which appeared on the 7th 
July 1 8 14, with an impression of one thousand 
copies, to Castle Dangerous, which was pub- 
lished at the close of November 1831, with 
an introduction sent from Naples in February 
1832, was a period of seventeen years and 
twenty-seven books. Some of them were 
written at white heat, the last two volumes of 
Waverley in three weeks ; some of them were 
written in agonising pain, as, for instance, The 
Bride of Lammermoor; many were written to 
pay a debt of honour. After the Fair Maid 

127 



128 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

of Perth the first French critic of our day 
considers a rapid decline and symptoms of 
exhaustion were observed, and the same 
writer believes that in dying Sir Walter had 
not taken with him any great unfinished idea. 
11 He had said enough for his glory and our 
delight . . . for the whole civilised 
world, a generous wizard and a kindly bene- 
factor." From Count Robert of Paris, 
which is cast in the decadence of the Byzan- 
tine period — " the tame worn-out civilisation 
of those European Chinese" — and was a 
burden which poor Scott's now " staggering 
penmanship " could not carry, to St. Ronan's 
Well, which was contemporary with himself, 
embraces seven centuries. To the age of 
chivalry belong The Betrothed, The Talis- 
man, and Ivanhoe. The fourteenth century 
has the Fair Maid of Perth, and the fifteenth 
is represented by Quentin Durward. To the 
sixteenth century are assigned The Abbot and 
The Monastery and Kenilworth, while the 
seventeenth lives before us in Woodstock and 
Peveril of the Peak for England and Old 
Mortality and the Legend of Montrose for 
Scotland. The eighteenth century is richly 
endowed by The Pirate, the Heart of Midlo- 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 129 

thian, Waverley, and Redgauntlet and Rob 
Roy. It is an achievement of the first order 
to travel through so many ages and in so many 
lands with unfailing sympathy and the most 
intimate touch, so that whatever be the value 
of Scott's history in the eyes of modern criti- 
cism, nothing human was strange to him and 
everything human was made to live in his 
pages. As Frederic Harrison, one of the most 
eloquent of our English critics, has said : " We 
see the dawn of our English nation, the de- 
fence of Christendom against the Koran, the 
grace and terror of Feudalism, the rise of 
monarchy out of baronies, the rise of Parlia- 
ments of monarchy, the rise of industry out 
of serfage, the pathetic ruin of chivalry, the 
splendid death struggle of Catholicism, the 
sylvan tribes of the mountains (remnants of 
our prehistoric forefathers) beating them- 
selves to pieces against the hard advance of 
modern industry. We see the grim heroism 
of the Bible martyrs, the catastrophe of feud- 
alism overwhelmed by a practical age which 
knew little of its graces and almost nothing of 
its virtues." 

It was the distinction of Scott more, per- 
haps, than any other writer, to originate the 



130 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

11 renaissance of wonder " in the nineteenth 
century, and his novels must be judged, not 
by the standard of historical science, but from 
the standpoint of imagination. It is per- 
fectly true that he places Shakespeare's plays 
in the mouths of men when, as some one pleas- 
antly remarks, Shakespeare was hardly old 
enough to rob an orchard, and on the other 
hand he will make Shakespeare die twenty 
years before his time. When Dr. Dryasdust 
starts to examine Scott's romances with a mi- 
croscope, I am prepared to believe he will 
find a thousand inaccuracies in minute detail 
and also some intrepid handling of the larger 
facts, and I would offer this advice to the 
young student of history, when he is intent 
on dates and facts, to close his Scott and give 
diligent ear to Freeman and Creighton and 
Gardiner, and amongst contemporary Scots- 
men to Hume Brown and Hay Fleming and 
that fine young scholar, Mr. Rait. If you 
desire to be introduced to the men and women 
who made history and to see them live and 
move, not pictures on a wall but actors on a 
stage, till you catch the glint of the eye and 
the flush on the face, till you hear the burst 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 131 

of passion and start at the sudden glow, till 
the tears come to your eyes at the real trag- 
edy, and you laugh aloud at the pleasant com- 
edy, then turn to this theatre where the play- 
ers are ever at their best because they are sim- 
ply human, and the play never wearies be- 
cause it deals with the perennial drama of 
humanity. When we desire to pass a meas- 
ured judgment upon the political or religious 
principles of any period, then must we seek 
some other teacher than this romanticist, but 
we have our own debt to pay to him. At the 
wave of his magical wand, knights rise before 
us in their steel armour; loyal blundering 
Cavaliers drink " a health to King Charles " ; 
grim fighting Covenanters sing their Psalm 
as they face Claverhouse's dragoons; absent- 
minded, kind-hearted antiquaries discourse 
on their discoveries; hard-handed Scots, 
soldiers of fortune like Dugald Dalgetty and 
Balafre, and broken, thieving caterans like 
Rob Roy. No one has ever given such a vivid 
likeness of King James VI., our Scots Solo- 
mon, with his awkward body, his foolish 
mouth, his undoubted learning, his timid na- 
ture, his kind heart, his mean ways, and his 



132 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

amazing self-conceit, and every student of 
morals must be grateful for his masterly study 
of Louis XI., so orthodox, superstitious, 
treacherous, cruel, able, a man of rat-like cun- 
ning, set amongst the gallant and honourable 
gentlemen of his court. 

Mr. Maurice Hewlett has delighted us with 
an artistic portrait of Queen Mary, but there 
is not in the Queen's Quair any passage so 
commanding as that when Mary in Loch 
Leven Castle is reminded by tactless Lady 
Fleming of a certain masque in Holyrood; 
and while many a modern novelist has tried 
his hand upon King Charles II., it is in 
Peveril of the Peak we get our most vivacious 
picture of the charming manners, imperturb- 
able good nature, political astuteness, unrec- 
ognised cleverness, and unblushing immoral- 
ity of the Merry Monarch. It sometimes oc- 
curs to one that no writer has ever done more 
absolute justice to the Stuarts than Sir Wal- 
ter, and none has felt more evidently the ro- 
mantic charm of that ill-fated house. He is 
indeed in the first line of the great creative 
minds of the world, for he has " definitely 
succeeded in the ideal reproduction of histori- 
cal types so as to preserve at once beauty, life, 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 133 

and truth," a task which a sound critic de- 
clares " not even Shakespeare himself entirely 
achieved." 

Out of this large and wealthy place, the 
world of men, in which Scott was as much at 
home as Shakespeare, Scotland was that 
province where he was most familiar and 
where his hand was firmest. " There is," said 
La Rochefoucauld, " a country accent, not 
in speech only, but in thought, conduct, char- 
acter, and manner of existing, which never 
forsakes a man," and no Scotsman was more 
entirely Scots than Sir Walter. What he did 
not know about Scotland, with one or two not- 
able exceptions on which I shall touch, is not 
knowledge. He had gone through the 
length and breadth of the land, and had met 
after a friendly fashion with all conditions. 
Pawky Scots provosts like him of Dumfries, 
who was a plain-spoken man, and kept right 
with both sides, advising Allan Fairford to 
keek into his letter of introduction before he 
delivered it, and hurrying off to the Council 
lest Bailie Laurie should be " trying some of 
his manoeuvres"; Bailie Nicol Jarvie, so in- 
nocently charged with self-importance, and 
so fearful that Bailie Graham should get a 



134 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

hold of the night's proceedings in the prison; 
border sheep farmers like big Dandie Din- 
mont, ready for a fight with a neighbour 
either at the fair or in the Law Courts, but 
scornful of the idea that he should take away 
his neighbour's land; local factors like Mac- 
wheeble, keeping together with hard toil 
their foolish clients' estates; Highland chiefs 
like M'lvor, poor, proud, and passionate, yet 
loyal to their cause and to their kinsmen; 
country gossips like Meg Dods, the masterful 
hostess of the Cleikum Inn; pragmatical 
servants full of argument and advice, like 
Richie Moniplies and Andrew Fairservice; 
theological peasants, unwearied in contro- 
versy and matchless in distinctions, like 
David Deans; judges, advocates, sheriffs, 
sheriff-substitutes, country writers, school- 
masters, ministers, beggars, fisher-folk, gip- 
sies, Highland clansmen, country lairds, 
great nobles. How distinct, how vivid, how 
convincing is each person in his album; as 
you turn the pages you identify the likeness 
by the representatives you have known your- 
self. Scott's novels have been translated into 
every civilised tongue, and Scott has become 
the most valuable commercial asset of his 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 135 

country, for the ends of the earth come to see 
the land of which he is the cicerone, and 
every third American is a lineal descendant 
of Queen Mary. With the United States as 
an annex of Scotland, through the conquer- 
ing genius of Sir Walter, one may not make 
an exclusive boast, but apart from Ameri- 
cans, he may believe that Scott's genius 
reached its height in the novels of his own 
country, and that only a Scot can appreciate 
the confident and faultless skill with which 
he etches the character of his people. 

Stevenson caught the romantic colour of 
Scots life, and could describe it with a dis- 
tinction of style to which our author had no 
claim, and in his Weir of Hermiston Steven- 
son has given us a powerful Northern type of 
the morose order, but he was not in touch 
with ordinary life, as Sir Walter was. With 
Stevenson the people are apt to be picturesque 
figures, whom he has lighted on and brought 
into his study as artists find inspiration by ac- 
cident, and turn it to account. With Scott 
they are gossips, men and women whom he 
has known, on the Tweed and the borders. 
He does not thrust exquisitely turned phrases 
into their mouths, but he lets them talk, and is 



136 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

pleased because they say the things which in- 
terest him. One class only was alien to him, 
the mercantile class, which was finding itself 
and coming into its kingdom, and passing re- 
form bills, and doing a hundred things which 
Scott did not appreciate. He gives a kindly 
part to " Jingling Geordie," because Heriot 
was a benefactor to his country, and did not 
pass from his own place at the beginning of 
the seventeenth century. And he deals pleas- 
antly with the Glasgow Bailie, but one knows 
that he sympathises with Rob Roy's con- 
temptuous rejection of a place in the Bailie's 
business for one of the young Macgregors. 
Scott did not set himself down to write the 
novel with a purpose, and his stories owe part 
of their charm to the fact that they are not 
studies in theology or the sexual question, but 
consciously or unconsciously they teach his 
gospel about society. When Carlyle com- 
plained that our highest literary man had no 
message whatever to deliver to the world he 
really is beside the mark, for Scott was 
charged in the marrow of his bones, as Carlyle 
used to say, with a creed, and it was one 
which Carlyle detested. Every novelist of 
the front rank who has produced an organic 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 137 

body of fiction, whether Balzac or Thack- 
eray, Flaubert or Zola, has a spinal cord run- 
ning through his books. It may not be car- 
ried to the tedious length of Balzac, or the 
pedantic genealogies of Zola, but it dominates 
the whole and is the pervading spirit. With 
Scott it was the ancient and dying spirit of 
feudalism. He was a stranger to the strug- 
gle of the times; he was a lover of past ages. 
His is the charm of autumn, the delicate 
colouring of a summer that is over. He 
touched no question of religious doubt and 
stood for the simplicity of faith, and one 
knows he is speaking for himself in the un- 
questioning reverence of his cavaliers for au- 
thority, and the submission of Scots peasants 
to their ministers. According to his idea, so- 
ciety was a graded order (he ought to have 
been the novelist of the " Young England " 
school) wherein each rank found its recog- 
nised place, and had its own privileges in sub- 
ordination to the whole. George IV* was, in 
this simple faith, an almost supernatural per- 
sonage, and the humble enthusiastic loyalty 
with which he welcomed that obese and very 
vulgar monarch to Scotland would have 
greatly delighted the cynical humour of 



188 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

Thackeray and shows how perfectly qualified 
Scott was to appreciate a cavalier's attitude 
to Charles II. The Duke of Buccleuch was 
his chief, whose sorrows he shared as his own, 
and whose recognition, whenever the Duke 
was pleased to write to him, he deeply valued. 
For himself, he belonged to the gentry, the 
third order after the King and the nobility, 
and above the farmers and the tradesmen. 
With him were lawyers and soldiers and the 
professional classes generally. For some rea- 
son he took little notice of medical men, and 
indeed has only one good doctor in his Scots 
novels (the apothecary in the Fair Maid of 
Perth is detestable), and although he is alto- 
gether admirable, I do not think that Gideon 
Grey has touched the popular imagination. 
It has been a bad tradition in literature either 
to ignore or to depreciate the most beneficent 
of professions, and one is thankful for the 
slender mercy of The Surgeon's Daughter. 
Each class in society was to be preserved in 
its proper rights so long as it remained in its 
own sphere. 

Scott was most friendly with his inferiors 
and most respectful to his superiors — ever on 
the understanding that he knew his place and 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 139 

they knew theirs. No person in his novels 
rises and is made a hero because he has 
climbed from poverty to riches. The self- 
made man hardly appears, and when he does, 
he is treated contemptuously. Christie 
Steele, the prejudiced old housekeeper of the 
Croftangrys, acknowledged that Mr. Tred- 
dle's mill had given employment in the dis- 
trict, but Mr. Treddle's efforts to be a coun- 
try gentleman only excited her acidulous hu- 
mour. When Mr. Gilbert Glossin, the coun- 
try lawyer in Guy Mannering, conciliates the 
pompous baronet and obtains a most conde- 
scending invitation to dinner, the achievement 
is understood to reflect credit on Glossin's 
adroitness. And Sir Arthur Wardour is fu- 
rious when a lawyer addresses him in a letter as 
11 Dear Sir " — " He will be calling me l Dear 
Knight' next." The Lord Keeper in The 
Bride of Lammermoor had scrambled up to 
his high position from a low estate, and there- 
fore he is a timid and propitiatory man, ill 
at ease among country sports, and afraid in 
the presence of the haughty young lord, who 
on his part, poverty-stricken but ancient born, 
dominates the Lord Keeper, as a hawk would 
terrify a barn-door fowl. Lady Ashton, on 



140 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

the other hand, one detests for her cruelty, 
but respects for her courage — the difference 
was that she had good blood in her veins. 
Dugald Dalgetty was a sturdy old blade and 
carried a conscience in him, for he would 
never take service with the other side till his 
time had expired with their opponents; he 
was a man of his hands, too, and one of the 
most vivid scenes in all Scott's work is Dugald 
seizing the Duke of Argyll in his castle. But 
Dalgetty shows badly beside the Highland 
chiefs, because, although he was a cock laird 
in Aberdeenshire, you can see that after all 
he was only a " body." Although Scott 
laughs at Lady Margaret Bellenden for her 
aristocratic prejudices and her recurring al- 
lusions to Charles II., he has a sneaking fond- 
ness for her, and drew her character from 
some of the old Jacobite ladies he knew; and 
although he makes play with Baron Bradwar- 
dine, with his family tree, bears, boot-jack and 
all, yet you feel that he would be just as much 
concerned about his own pedigree. He be- 
lieves in the better class showing kindness to 
the poorer, and there is an atmosphere every- 
where of good cheer, but it is the kindness of 
a chief to his clansmen. His men drink, and 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 141 

perhaps put away as much as Dickens's heroes, 
which is saying a great deal, but they drink 
like gentlemen, not like grooms. Mrs. Gamp 
is very taking, and a philosopher in her own 
way, but she would be quite out of place in 
the Waverley Novels. There are homely 
women in them, and Meg Dods had all Mrs. 
Gamp's force of character and native resolu- 
tion, but no person is vulgar. Among all his 
peasants I do not remember one, with the 
doubtful exception of worthy Andrew Fair- 
service, who is mean. His poor Highlanders, 
the " Dougal cratur " and the rest of them, 
and his Lowland ploughmen, Cuddie Head- 
r *gg> f° r instance, all command respect, as 
sound-minded and able-bodied men, just as 
much as their masters in their place. One of 
the finest and most discriminating things 
Scott ever did is the story of the two drovers, 
where the basal difference between the High- 
land and the Lowland character is admirably 
drawn, so that any one who reads it will un- 
derstand that there is a gulf between, say a 
Yorkshire man and a Ross-shire man. They 
have different virtues and different vices, 
their blood runs at a different heat, and their 
eyes look on a different world. Scott rose to 



142 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

his height, and his imagination burned with 
its purest flame, when he describes the loyalty 
of a Highlander to his chief. " I was only 
ganging to say, my lord," said Evan Mac- 
combich, when both his chief and he had been 
condemned to death at Carlisle Assizes, " that 
if your excellent honour and the honourable 
Court would let Vich Ian Vohr go free just 
this once, and let him gae back to France, and 
no to trouble King George's government 
again, that ony six o' the very best of his clan 
will be willing to be justified in his stead; and 
if you'll just let me gae down to Glennaquoich 
I'll fetch them up to ye mysell, to head or 
hang, and you may begin wi' me the very first 
man." And when a sort of laugh was heard 
in the Court, Evan looked round sternly. 
" If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing," he 
said, li because a poor man such as me, thinks 
my life or the life of six of my degree, is 
worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough 
they may be very right ; but if they laugh be- 
cause they think I would not keep my word, 
and come back to redeem him, I can tell them 
they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, 
nor the honour of a gentleman." He disliked 
the change from the old to the new, when the 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 143 

Treddles supplant the Croftangrys, and also 
new-fangled fashions, and would rather share 
the feudal and homely hospitality of Lord 
Huntingtower's house in the Fortunes of 
Nigel, than go with his profligate son, Lord 
Dalgarno, to the French eating-house and the 
gambling table. A clear distinction is drawn 
between the two apprentices in the same 
novel, because the one is only a London 
trader's son, and the other belongs to a poor, 
but gentle Northern house. 

Some one was recently denouncing an in- 
genuous woman writer, beloved of shop-girls, 
and declaring her to be immoral, and his 
ground was that she was fond of marrying 
the shop-girl to the lord, or some other 
achievement of the same kind. Scott cer- 
tainly was cleansed from all immorality of 
this kind (with the inevitable solitary excep- 
tion), and no woman of gentle birth marries 
beneath her in Scott, and no man aspires to a 
woman above him. They marry and give in 
marriage each within his own degree. It is 
true that pretty Peggy Ramsay in the For- 
tunes of Nigel does become Lady Glenvarl- 
och, but this exigency of the story is relieved 
by establishing some connection between the 



144 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

clockmaker's daughter and the great Dal- 
housie family. If Morton in Old Mortality 
marries Miss Bellenden, it is to be remem- 
bered he is an officer's son, although his father 
was a mean old laird, and that he does not 
marry her till he himself is a distinguished 
officer. The line between gentlefolk and the 
rest of creation is kindly, quietly, but con- 
stantly and firmly drawn. 

His feudal gospel affords a more engaging 
illustration for the majority of people when 
he treats, as he loves to do, of the loyalty of a 
servant to his master. One of his most de- 
lightful minor creations is the " Dougal 
cratur," the type of dog-like fidelity. When 
he thinks it wise to fling up his post as turn- 
key in Glasgow gaol, he is careful to leave 
the doors unlocked so that his chief and Bailie 
Nicol Jarvie may not be caught in a trap, and 
when the Bailie is sore put to it in the public- 
house, Dugald jumped up from the floor with 
his native sword and target in his hand to do 
battle for the discomfited magistrate. " Her 
nainsell has eaten the town pread at the Cross 
o' Glasgow, and py her troth she'll fight 
for Bailie Sharvie at the Clachan of Aber- 
f oyle — tat will she e'en ! " Macwheeble was 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 145 

an abject and a worm of the dust, and one of 
the drollest scenes in Scott's vein of humour 
is the worthy man wishing to take charge of 
Vich Ian Vohr's purse on the campaign and to 
lay the money out at interest; and there's no 
end to the scheming and parsimony of the 
Bailie, but there was the honest feudal heart 
hid away beneath the dirt and dross. ll If I 
fall, Macwheeble," said his master, Brad- 
wardine, " you have all my papers and know 
all my affairs; be just to Rose," whereat the 
worthy factor set up a lamentable howl. " If 
that doleful day should come while Duncan 
Macwheeble had a boddle it should be Miss 
Rose's. He would scroll for a plack or she 
kenn'd what it was to want." And Scott has 
fewer more cunning scenes than Waverley's 
visit to Macwheeble when the war was over, 
and Macwheeble was suspiciously watching 
every visitor. For a while he listened to 
Waverley with anxiety lest he had come to 
claim assistance, was greatly cheered when he 
heard that it was well with him, and when he 
declared his intention of sharing his fortune 
with Miss Rose Bradwardine, the Bailie rose 
to his height. " He flung his best wig out 
of the window because the block on which it 



146 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

was placed stood in the way of his career, 
chucked his cap to the ceiling, caught it as it 
fell; whistled Tullochgorum ; danced a High- 
land fling with inimitable grace and agility, 
and then threw himself exhausted into a chair 
exclaiming, " Lady Wauverley! — ten thou- 
sand a year, the least penny! Lord preserve 
my poor understanding." And after making 
a hurried note on a sheet of paper, " a sma' 
minute to prevent parties fra resiling," he 
broke forth again. " Lady Wauverley, ten 
thousand a year! Lord be gude unto me 
. . . it dings Balmawhapple out and out, 
a year's rent worth of Balmawhapple, fee and 
life rent, Lord make us thankful." Brad- 
wardine himself lies concealed on his own es- 
tate and not a tenant will betray him, and he 
often finds " bits of things in my way that the 
poor bodies, God help them, put there be- 
cause they think they may be useful to me." 
Richie Moniplies is a preaching and provok- 
ing fool of a man-servant, but he is unflinch- 
ingly loyal to Nigel, and therefore Scott gives 
him a knighthood before he has done with 
him. Edie Ochiltree, the beggar man, when 
there is a threatening of invasion, lends a hand 
for the defence of the land he loves, and 
proves himself a dog of the old Scots breed —* 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 147 

a fighting terrier — and not the shiftless, 
treacherous, cowardly tramp of our highways. 
It is a mistake to suppose that any novelist 
can simply lift living persons into his pages. 
This would be a violation of the technique of 
his art, and were the same thing as if one 
pasted a photograph into the middle of a pic- 
ture. The characters in real fiction have been 
his own creation, but his imagination has been 
fed with the material of life. Scott lived 
among the people of his novels before they 
took service with him in literature. If he 
deals very kindly with faithful Caleb Balder- 
stone it was because his own household were 
so faithful to him. He took a fancy to a 
poacher that was brought before him for jus- 
tice and passed him into his own service, and 
Purdie was his loyal henchman hencefor- 
ward. When evil days befell Scott and he 
had to reduce his establishment, Pepe Mathie- 
son, who used to be the coachman, was willing 
to be the ploughman, and Scott was most 
grateful for this fealty. " I cannot forget," 
says Lockhart, " how his eyes sparkled when 
he first pointed out to me Peter Mathieson 
guiding the plough on the Haugh. l Egad,' 
he said, l old Pepe and old Pepe's whistling 
at his darg. The honest fellow said a yoking 



148 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

in a deep field would do baith him and the 
blackies good. If things get round with me, 
easy shall be Pepe's cushion. 57 One of the 
trials of Scott's life was the death of Thomas 
Purdie, the ex-poacher and trusty servitor. 
" I have lost," Scott writes, " my old and 
faithful servant, and am so much shocked that 
I really wish to be quit of the country and safe 
in town. I have this day laid him in the 
grave." This was the inscription on Purdie's 
tomb — 

IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE 

OF 

THE FAITHFUL 

AND ATTACHED SERVICES 

OF 

TWENTY-TWO YEARS, 

AND IN SORROW 

FOR THE LOSS OF A HUMBLE 

BUT SINCERE FRIEND, 

THIS STONE WAS ERECTED 

BY 

Sir WALTER SCOTT, Bart., 

of Abbotsford. 



li 



Thou hast been faithful 
Over a few things, 
I will make thee ruler 
Over many things." 



WAVERLY NOVELS 149 

This is the heart of the Waverley Novels, 
and Scott's sweetest note. 

Thomson, the son of the minister of Melrose, 
who became tutor at Abbotsford, won Scott's 
heart because he lost his leg in an encounter of 
his boyhood and refused to betray the name of 
the companion that had occasioned the mis- 
hap. " In the Dominie, like myself, accident 
has spoiled a capital life-guardsman, and so 
many were his eccentricities, so rich his learn- 
ing, and so sound his principles, that he sat 
for good Dominie Sampson." It may have 
struck the reader of the Fair Maid of Perth 
that the physical timidity of Conachar, the 
young Highland chief, and the disgrace of 
his flight from the battle on the North Inch 
of Perth, where his henchmen had died so 
bravely for him, was written with a certain 
sympathy of feeling. That passage in which 
one is made to pity the poor lad was Scott's 
atonement for perhaps the one cruel deed of 
his life, his contemptuous anger against a 
brother who had refused to fight a duel (he 
was willing to fight one in old age himself). 
A lover of all dumb animals, he pays his trib- 
ute to Maida and his other favourite dogs in 
fievis, the noble hound of Woodstock, and 



150 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

many another friendly fellow, whom his hand 
touches gently in fiction. When the Baron 
of Bradwardine comes down to Janet's cottage 
and Waverley and he have their supper to- 
gether, Ban and Buscar have also their share. 
They play their loyal part, too, and Scott is 
still teaching his lesson of fidelity as much as 
when he wrote the epitaph on old Maida — 

" Beneath the sculptured form, which late you wore, 
Sleep soundly, Maida, at your master's door." 

When the Antiquary came forward at the 
young fisherman's funeral and said that, as 
landlord to the deceased, he would carry his 
head to the grave, it was Scott's own heart 
speaking, and old Alison Breck, among the 
fish-women, swore almost aloud, funeral 
though it was. " His honour Monkbarns 
should never want sax warp of oysters in the 
season (of which fish he was understood to be 
fond) if she should gang to sea and dredge 
for them herself, in the foulest wind that ever 
blew." It was when staying with a friend at 
Loch Lomond that he bethought himself of 
Rob Roy and laid out the scenery in his mind, 
and among his acquaintances he found the de- 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 151 

lightful Antiquary. The Epic of Jeanie 
Deans he took from actual life, and even the 
smugglers' secret cellars in Redgauntlet he 
had found at Berwick. The Covenanters of 
a later generation he had seen and not particu- 
larly loved, and the old Scots gossips who 
talk in the post-office scene — one of the 
most successful interiors of Scott — he had 
met in many a cottage. He is most convin- 
cing when he is dealing with Scots life; young 
Waverley, the English squire, is a shadow be- 
side the Antiquary, and Scott himself de- 
scribes him as a sneaking piece of imbecility, 
and declared his conviction that " if he had 
married Flora M'lvor she would have set 
him up upon the chimneypiece." The Eng- 
lish peasant in Scott's novels is a wooden 
figure beside Cuddie Headrigg, and the Lon- 
don cashier a poor ghost in the presence of 
Bailie Nicol Jarvie. If his Scots lairds, and 
Scots peasants, and Scots women of the work- 
ing class are not real, and do not carry them- 
selves as flesh and blood, then there is no re- 
ality in fiction. 

With all his inherent nobility of soul and 
personal elevation above everything mean, 
Scott had a thorough appreciation of what 



152 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

has been called, and no word so accurately 
describes it, the " pawkiness " of Scots char- 
acter, which is shared in some degree by all 
classes from ploughmen to ecclesiastics, and 
of which a Bailie is often the perfect imper- 
sonation. And this characteristic quality of 
the Scots people has been immortalised in one 
of Scott's most felicitous passages, when Niel 
Blane gives directions to his daughter how to 
manage the public-house in the trying days 
of Claverhouse and the Covenanters. " Jenny, 
this is the first day that ye are to take 
the place of your worthy mother in attending 
to the public; a douce woman she was, civil 
to the customers, and had a good name wi' 
Whig and Tory, baith up the street and doun 
the street. It will be hard for you to fill 
her place, especially on sic a thrang day as 
this; but Heaven's will maun be obeyed. 
Jenny, whatever Milnwood ca's for, be sure 
he maun hae't, for he's the captain o' the 
Popinjay, and auld customs maun be sup- 
ported; if he canna pay the lawing himsell, as 
I ken he's keepit unco short by the head, I'll 
find a way to shame it out o' his uncle. — The 
curate is playing at dice wi' Cornet Grahame. 
Be eident and civil to them baith — clergy 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 153 

and captains can gie an unco deal o' fash in 
thae times, where they take an ill-will. — The 
dragoons will be crying for ale, and they 
wunna want it, and maunna want it — they are 
unruly chiels, but they pay ane some gate or 
other. I gat the humle-cow, that's the best 
in the byre, frae black Frank Inglis and 
Sergeant Bothwell for ten pund Scots, and 
they drank out the price at ae downsitting. 
. . . Whist! ye silly tawpie, we have 
naething to do how they come by the bestial 
they sell — be that atween them and their 
consciences. — Aweel. — Take notice, Jenny, 
of that dour, stour-looking carle that sits by 
the cheek o' the ingle, and turns his back on 
a' men. He looks like one o' the hill folk, 
for I saw him start a wee when he saw the 
redcoats, and I jalouse he wad hae liked to 
hae ridden by, but his horse (it's a good geld- 
ing) was ower sair travailed; he behoved to 
stop whether he wad or no. Serve him can- 
nily, Jenny, and wP little din, and dinna 
bring the sodgers on him by speering ony 
questions at him; but let him no hae a room 
to himsell, they wad say ye were hiding him. 
■ — For yoursell, Jenny, ye'll be civil to a' the 
folk, and take nae heed o' ony nonsense and 



154 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

daffing the young lads may say f ye. Folk in 
the hostler line maun put up wi' muckle. 
Your mither, rest her saul, could put up wi' as 
muckle as maist women — but off hands is 
fair play; and if onybody be uncivil ye may 
gie me a cry. — Aweel, when the malt begins 
to get aboon the meal, they'll begin to speak 
about government in kirk and state, and then, 
Jenny, they are like to quarrel — let them be 
doing — anger's a drouthy passion, and the 
mair they dispute, the mair ale they'll drink; 
but ye were best serve them wi' a pint o' the 
sma' browst, it will heat them less, and they'll 
never ken the difference." 

Scott's religious position has been, as was 
inevitable, the subject of keen controversy, for 
Scotland has ever been a land of theological 
debate, and is to-day living up with spirit to 
her ancient character. When Sir Walter 
opened the novel of Old Mortality on the 5th 
of May 1679, and plunged into the life of that 
day in the West of Scotland, he took his cour- 
age in both his hands, for he chose the period 
and the scene of the hottest conflict in Scots 
history. Owing partly to the wildness of the 
scenery and partly to the intensity of the peo- 
ple, the history of Scotland has been one long 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 155 

romance, and from the Reformation, religion 
was the original cause and burning fire of 
every controversy. No one can understand 
Scots history without fixing in his mind that 
religion has played the chief part in the mak- 
ing of Scots life, and that the Scots have been 
ready to argue and to fight, not only about the 
great principles which have divided, say the 
Roman from the Protestant faith, but also 
about the jots and tittles of their creed. Fine 
scruples have created parties within the Scots 
Kirk which are almost innumerable, and 
which certainly are now unintelligible to the 
modern mind. Sir Walter has crystallised 
the perfervidum ingenium of the Scots folk 
in this book, and staged not the politics only 
but the theology of Scotland. There were 
the Cavaliers under Claverhouse hunting the 
Presbyterians, who were hiding on the moors, 
and meeting in Conventicles for worship, and 
the Covenanters growing ever more bitter and 
determined under this persecution, till at last 
they were ready to renounce allegiance to the 
King, as well as to denounce the Bishops, and 
there were the less extreme Presbyterians who 
thought that their brethren had gone too far, 
and endeavoured to reconcile their own reli- 



156 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

gious principles with loyalty to government 
This was the situation of Old Mortality, and 
these the feelings which moved its characters. 
Scott's insight and fairness must be judged by 
his studies of Claverhouse on the one hand, 
and the Presbyterian ministers on the other, 
and it has been difficult to satisfy every per- 
son about Claverhouse. Macaulay, who is 
neither a Covenanter nor an advocate of their 
particular case, asserts that Claverhouse 
goaded the peasantry of the Western Low- 
lands into madness, and murdered a pious 
Covenanter called Brown before his wife's 
eyes, while in Napier's Memoirs of Dundee 
Grahame is represented as a patriotic Scots- 
man as well as a gallant soldier, and this was 
also the portrait drawn by another Jacobite 
man of letters, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. 
" Bloody Claverhouse " was the Covenanting 
nickname, and " Bonnie Dundee " was the 
Cavalier description of the same man, and it 
is only less dangerous to hold the scales of 
justice in the life of Claverhouse than in that 
of Queen Mary. It was to his credit that he 
was on bad terms with the drunken politicians 
of the day, and that he remained to the end of 
his career an unselfish loyalist, doing all that 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 157 

in him lay for the Stuart family, with very 
little thanks from either them or their ad- 
visers, and that he died at the battle of Kil- 
liecrankie fighting for a lost cause. It was 
not the least of his exploits that he won 
the heart of Lady Jean Cochrane, whose 
mother was an extreme Covenanter; but there 
seems little doubt that behind a fair face and 
graceful manner he hid a determined and un- 
swerving purpose, that to his friends he was 
tender and true, and to the enemies of his 
cause absolutely murderous, and that in spite 
of the apologies of his biographer, Napier, 
and the glamour cast round him in Lays of the 
Scottish Cavaliers, he treated the Covenanters 
with great cruelty and did not shrink from 
military murders. Upon the whole I am in- 
clined to think that the study of Grahame in 
Old Mortality, although it has been so se- 
verely criticised in Covenanting quarters, is 
not far from the truth, for full justice is done 
to his personal attractiveness and disinterested 
loyalty, while his disregard of popular rights 
and his indifference to suffering are clearly 
represented. 

Whether Scott has rendered equal justice to 
the other side is another question, and per- 



158 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

haps he ought not to have prejudiced the case 
by caricaturing the names of the Covenanting 
ministers. One is inclined beforehand to laugh 
at clergymen who are called Poundtext or Ket- 
tledrummle, or Habakkuk Mucklewrath. 
The reader must, however, remember that the 
names are only the license of a novelist, and 
that the Presbyterian minister did not pound 
his text any more clumsily, and that he was 
not any more a kettledrum in the matter of 
noise than the Episcopalian curate of the day. 
One cannot tell who sat for Poundtext, but 
for Kettledrummle and Mucklewrath one sus- 
pects that Scott depended upon the lives of 
Peden and Cameron, as told with remarkable 
felicity of style by Patrick Walker, in the 
book called Biographia Presbyteriana. Pat- 
rick Walker could tell a story with engaging 
vigour, and was a great favourite with Rob- 
ert Louis Stevenson, who, in his Letters, vol. ii. 
p. 312, says: " I have lately been returning to 
my wallowing in the mire. When I was a 
child, and indeed until I was nearly a man, I 
consistently read Covenanting books. Now 
that I am a grey-beard — or would be if I 
could raise the beard — I have returned, and 
for weeks back have read little else but Wod- 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 159 

row, Walker, Shields, &c." McBriar, whom 
Scott treats with more respect, is almost cer- 
tainly Hugh McKail, a young clergyman of 
delicate constitution and beautiful character, 
who threw himself into the Covenanting 
cause, and was involved in the " Pentland 
Rising." He was taken prisoner and put to 
death in Edinburgh in the twenty-sixth year 
of his age. During his trial he was tortured 
in the " boots," and Scott has used the scene 
in Old Mortality. McKail was a high-spir- 
ited enthusiast, and his last words on the scaf- 
fold were : " I ascend to my Father and your 
Father, to my God and your God — to my 
King and your King, to the blessed Apostles 
and Martyrs, and to the city of the living 
God, the Heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumer- 
able company of Angels, to the general as- 
sembly of the first-born, to God the Judge of 
all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, 
and to Jesus the mediator of the new cove- 
nant; and I bid you all farewell, for God will 
be more comfortable to you than I could be, 
and He will be now more refreshing to me 
than you could be. Farewell, farewell in 
the Lord!" 

From the moderate Presbyterian clergy, so 



160 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

poorly represented by Poundtext, Scott might 
have taken men like Robert Douglas, of whom 
it was written : " He was a great state 
preacher, one of the greatest of that age in 
Scotland, for he feared no man to declare the 
mind of God to him, yet very accessible and 
easy to be conversed with." Or Lawrence 
Charteris, who was described by Bishop Bur- 
net as " a perfect friend and a most sublime 
Christian. He did not talk of the defects of 
his kind like an angry reformer, but like a 
man full of a deep but humble sense of them." 
He used to say the defection among them has 
been " from the temper and conversation 
which the Gospel requires of us." Above all 
he could have chosen Leighton, who was first 
of all a Presbyterian minister and then a 
Bishop, but above all a Christian; and Car- 
stairs, who was persecuted before the Refor- 
mation, and after the Reformation became the 
most powerful man in Scotland, who showed 
the greatest kindness to the party that had 
persecuted him, and was beyond question the 
ablest clergyman of his day. It is always a 
misfortune, and one may find a contemporary 
illustration, when any body of men are driven 
into extreme views and desperate actions, for 
they become either absurd or fanatical, and 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 161 

the real conscience and courage of the Cove- 
nanters have been much disfigured by a want 
of charity in their utterances and common 
sense in their policy. But it is well to re- 
member that they were not all Kettle- 
drummles, and Scott declares in a note to Old 
Mortality, that if he had to rewrite the tale 
he would give the Moderate Party a better 
representative than Peter Poundtext, and even 
the severest critic of Scott from the Covenant- 
ing side must admit that in Jeanie Deans 
he drew a perfect type of humble Scots 
piety. 

Is it wonderful that the extreme wing of 
Scots religion, which has not always been in 
profound sympathy with literature, has found 
some difficulty in accepting Scott as an 
interpreter of our nation, when Thomas Car- 
lyle, who was by instinct a man of letters, has 
not dealt so generously with his distinguished 
fellow-countryman as those who love both 
men could desire. Among certain admirable 
doctrines of the Roman faith there is one 
called " invincible ignorance " which ought to 
be allowed greater play in every controversy, 
theological or political, and not least in racial 
misunderstandings. By our heredity and en- 
vironment, by the books we have read and the 



162 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

men who have taught us, by the blood in our 
veins and the people among whom we have 
lived, we are apt to be so impressed and so 
biassed as to be blinded to the truth of a creed 
which is not ours, and the excellence of men 
who are of another type. It were a counsel 
of perfection to ask from a Puritan justice to 
Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell, and al- 
though it was a fine achievement of Erasmus 
to appreciate at their value both Luther and 
Pope Leo X., that humanist is a rare figure 
in history, and I am sorry to say not a force 
in affairs. People full of the strong wine of 
Scots controversy are apt to speak as if there 
has been only one Scotland ; the Scotland cre- 
ated by John Knox and the ministers of the 
Kirk, by the theology of Calvin and the demo- 
cratic education of the parish school, and rep- 
resented admirably and successfully by that 
middle class which has supplied the elders to 
the Kirk and the traders to foreign parts, and 
up to this time has made Scotland intelligent 
and prosperous. They forget that there has 
been always another Scotland since the days 
of Queen Mary, of Catholics, Episcopalians, 
Jacobites, and Moderate Kirkmen, like that 
excellent man of sincerity and courtesy, who 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 163 

ended a note to John Knox, " Farewell in 
Christ, and endeavour to let truth prevail and 
not the man," and Archbishop Leighton who 
was weary of wrangling, and Carstairs who 
held the scales level between both sides, and 
the literary men who, at the close of the 
eighteenth century, made Edinburgh glorious 
through the world. Unto this Scotland be- 
longed for the most part the soldiers, the great 
lawyers, poets, and scholars, and of this line 
Scott had come. He was a Cavalier whose 
heart was with Prince Charles, though his 
reason was with King George, who could ap- 
preciate the courage of the Covenanters, but 
whose own attitude would have been that of 
Young Morton in Old Mortality. Scott in 
his geniality and charity, his sympathies with 
the virtues of a chivalrous past, and his in- 
stinctive dislike of religious extremity, was a 
Moderate, and has behind him a minority, 
perhaps, of the Scots people, but a minority 
commanding respect for its appreciation of a 
storied past, its devotion to Art and Letters^ 
its love of peace and its principle of charity. 
It is to the credit of Sir Walter that he, the 
descendant of those border raiders, has been 
as comprehensive and as tolerant. 



164 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

Carlyle, on the other hand, whatever may 
have been his former creed or his local sur- 
roundings, was all his days a Calvinist and a 
democrat, with the narrowness and sincerity, 
the strength and intolerance of the peasant 
class from which he sprung. It is natural for 
Carlyle to ridicule Sir Walter's desire to es- 
tablish a county family, and one recognises 
that the ambitions of Abbotsford and Eccle- 
fechan were hopelessly at variance, but as one 
who received his first literary inspiration from 
Carlyle's address to the students of Edinburgh 
University, and who has felt the iron of Car- 
lyle's virile gospel pass as a tonic into his 
blood, I cannot but regret that Carlyle in his 
well-known essay did such poor justice to 
Scott and the Waverley Novels. When he 
speaks of him as writing daily "with the 
ardour of a steam-engine, that he might make 
fifteen thousand a year and buy upholstery 
with it," and pronounces that " his work is 
not profitable for doctrine or reproof or edi- 
fication or building up or elevating in any 
shape," one knows that he has seen Scott in 
a glass darkly, and that because he had not 
come with open face. When he enlarges 
upon Scott as one of the healthiest of men, 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 165 

and allows with condescension that amuse- 
ment in the way of reading can go no further 
than his tales, one wishes that Carlyle had 
left Scott alone and confined himself to Burns, 
whom he understood from the heart out, for 
they were by heredity of the same breed. 
Compare Lockhart's Scott; one of the most 
wholesome biographies in our literature, and 
the Life of Carlyle. Carlyle complains that 
Scott's biography had run to seven volumes, 
but his in one shape or other has run to 
several volumes more, and no one can be 
sure when it will be finally concluded, and 
his grave be left in peace. Carlyle is in 
serious doubt whether Scott was a great 
man, and while he admits he was a demi- 
god among the circulating heroes of the 
library, he sees no likelihood of a place for 
him among the great writers of all ages. 
Well, the books stand together upon the 
shelf of every student of literature and Scots 
history; we can form our own judgment 
of greatness. It is a means of grace to read 
Scott's life, in which, if nothing is set down 
in malice, nothing is extenuated, for his stain- 
less purity in which there was no touch of au- 
sterity, his winsome good nature which never 



166 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

seemed to fail, his kindliness to every person 
and creature that came into contact with him, 
his too generous help to second-rate writers 
and rash publishers, his generous forgiveness 
of the wrongs which he suffered in business 
affairs, his heroic endurance of the cruellest 
pain, his early romantic attachment which 
was the shadow on his life, his chivalrous serv- 
ice of his wife who was not his real love, his 
courage in the great crash of his affairs, his 
persistent toil to pay other men's debts, and 
his gentle, believing death, bring us into an 
atmosphere in which it is good to live. No 
woman had ever cause to complain of Scott's 
rudeness, no man heard him whine about his 
illnesses, no fellow-writer was contemptuously 
treated by him, no man was afraid to speak to 
him. He had no affectations, either in style 
or manner; he had neither grudges nor jeal- 
ousies; every one loved him — his wife, his 
children, his friends, his printers, his serv- 
ants, his dogs. " Scott," says Lord Tenny- 
son, " is the most chivalrous literary figure of 
this century, and the author with the finest 
range since Shakespeare." His was the great- 
ness of faith and charity, and one may hold 
with reason that Scotland has never produced 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 167 

a finer instance of practical and persuasive 
religion. 

The subtle quality of a man's character 
passes into his work and becomes its preserving 
salt, but a great writer must submit his work 
to the arbitrament, not of the popularity of his 
day, but of the criticism which is above every 
day. There are books which catch the ear of 
the people and pass away having served their 
purpose, there are books which remain and 
they are the classics. " The last discovery of 
modern culture," a competent writer says, " is 
that Scott's prose is commonplace. The 
young men at our universities are too critical 
to care for his artless sentences and flowing 
descriptions. As boys love lollipops, so these 
juvenile fops love to roll phrases under the 
tongue, as if phrases in themselves had any 
value apart from thoughts, feelings, great con- 
ceptions of human sympathy." From the cir- 
culars of publishers I learn that new editions 
of Scott are ever appearing, but from private 
observation I do not find the younger genera- 
tion is reading Scott, and without any disre- 
spect to the literary craftsmen of the day, this 
seems to me a calamity. It reminds me of 
Ruskin's saying, about wondering, not how 



168 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

much people suffer, but how much they lose. 
It may be that Scott has indulged too much in 
introductions, and has dared to add notes 
which are full of instruction, but which, on 
that account, this generation does not desire. 
Or it may be that he has not the trick of sen- 
sational plot, and did not strike upon the in- 
vention of the detective story. There is, how- 
ever, good ground for believing that his hold 
is permanent, and that in the end his vogue 
will be universal. When estimating Scott we 
must remind ourselves what he essayed to do, 
and his was that which is the first and will be 
the last form of literature. When the first 
half-dozen humans gathered in a cave one 
told how he had killed some monstrous beast, 
and that was the beginning of letters ; when the 
last half-dozen huddle together on the cold 
earth some one will tell of his battle with a 
seal, and that will be the end of letters. Litera- 
ture began with a story, and nothing so holds 
the human mind, and the genius of Sir Wal- 
ter Scott was the genius of the story. Let us 
grant that his style was not " precious/' let us 
even grant that it was sometimes redundant, if 
you please slipshod, he could afford even if he 
chose to be ungrammatical. His was the easy 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 169 

undress of one whose position was assured and 
who was indifferent to little conventionalities. 
Between the books of precocious moderns and 
the Waverley Novels there is the same differ- 
ence as between the trim lawn and the neat 
little beds of a villa garden, and the mountain 
side with the swelling waves of purple heather 
and the emerald green between. It partakes 
of a debating society to inquire which is his 
greatest book, but I suppose his mightiest 
three are Old Mortality, the Antiquary, and 
the Heart of Midlothian. With those three 
and his Shakespeare a man might be content. 
For this is the large and wealthy place of lit- 
erature, where you breathe the air of Homer 
and of Virgil, of Dante and Milton. And 
for a single passage of passion and pathos I 
can only remember one other from Thackeray 
to be compared with the plea which Jeanie 
Deans made with the Queen for her sister's 
life:— 

" O, madam, if ever ye kend what it was 
to sorrow for and with a sinning and a suffer- 
ing creature, whose mind is sae tossed that she 
can be neither ca'd fit to live or die, have 
some compassion on our misery! Save an 
honest house from dishonour, and an unhappy 



170 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

girl, not eighteen years of age, from an early 
and dreadful death! Alas! it is not when 
we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves that 
we think on other people's sufferings. Our 
hearts are waxed light within us then, and we 
are for righting our ain wrangs and fighting 
our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble 
comes to the mind or to the body — and sel- 
dom may it visit your leddyship — and when 
the hour of death comes, that comes to high 
and low — lang and late may it be yours — 
O, my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune 
for oursels, but what we hae dune for others, 
that we think on maist pleasantly. And the 
thought that ye hae intervened to spare the 
puir thing's life will be sweeter in that hour, 
come when it may, than if a word of your 
mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at 
the tail of ae tow." x 

And yet, and I quote a modern: "This 
glorious poet, without whom our very con- 
ception of human development would have 
ever been imperfect, this manliest and truest 
and widest of romances, we neglect for some 
hothouse hybrid of psychological analysis, for 
the wretched imitators of Balzac and the 

1 Heart of Midlothian, vol. ii. chap. xii. p. 210. 



WAVERLEY NOVELS 171 

jackanapes phrasemongering of some Osric of 
our day, who assure us that Scott is an " abso- 
lute Philistine." It remains, however, that a 
man may be greater than his work. If there 
be any goodness throughout the Waverley 
Novels, it was the inspiration of their writer. 
They have added to the company of our 
friends many high-spirited women and many 
gallant gentlemen, they have taught us to 
think more kindly of human nature and to 
seek after the highest things, but they have 
introduced us to no braver or truer man than 
Scott himself. Unintoxicated by prosperity 
and unbroken in adversity, toiling to redeem 
that dreadful debt while his wife lay dying, 
and after her death going back to his work 
without any public moan, he did his part 
right knightly. With Shakespeare he is the 
chief creative genius of our English literature, 
and with Burns he is the proud glory of Scots 
letters. And now, if in jealous affection we 
have complained that Carlyle did less than 
justice to Scott's w r ork, we gladly accept his 
beautiful tribute to Scott's character. " When 
he departed he took a man's life along with 
him. No sounder piece of British manhood 
was put together in that eighteenth century of 



172 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 

time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its 
shaggy honesty, sagacity, and goodness, when 
we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, 
was all worn with care, the joy all fled from 
it: ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. 
We shall never forget it; we shall never see it 
again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scots- 
men, take our proud and sad farewell." 



THE END 



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